10-Hour Weekly Plan
10-Hour Weekly Plan
Section titled “10-Hour Weekly Plan”
Ten hours a week is the sweet spot for most serious candidates. It’s enough to make real progress on all three skills without demanding that wine study swallow your whole life. Doubling the five-hour plan doesn’t just add time — it changes what becomes possible. You can now taste more than once a week, run service with a partner, and give theory the repetition it needs to stick. The risk shifts too: with ten hours, the temptation is to pour it all into whatever you enjoy most. Resist that. This plan works because it forces balance.
Who this pace fits
Section titled “Who this pace fits”This is the working pace for Certified candidates and for committed Introductory candidates with a real exam date on the horizon. It assumes you have two solid weekday evenings and some weekend availability. If you’re aiming at Advanced, treat ten hours as your floor, not your target.
The week at a glance
Section titled “The week at a glance”The structure adds a second tasting session and a partnered service block, and it protects a dedicated weekly review.
| Day | Time | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 75 min | Theory: new region deep-dive |
| Tuesday | 60 min | Blind tasting: 3–4 wines, full grid |
| Wednesday | 60 min | Theory: consolidate Monday + flashcards |
| Thursday | 60 min | Service rehearsal, ideally with a partner |
| Friday | 60 min | Blind tasting: 3–4 wines, focus on your weak calls |
| Saturday | 90 min | Theory: second region + map drawing |
| Sunday | 45 min | Review week, log errors, plan next week |
That’s about five hours of theory, two of tasting, one of service, and a review block — roughly a Certified-appropriate weighting.
Getting value from the added volume
Section titled “Getting value from the added volume”- Two tasting sessions change the game. One session a week teaches vocabulary; two teach calibration. Use Tuesday to practice the method cleanly and Friday to attack whatever grape or structure you keep misreading.
- Service with a partner. Ten hours finally makes a standing service appointment worthwhile. A partner playing a demanding guest exposes the gaps that solo rehearsal hides — hesitation, weak recommendations, awkward recovery when a bottle is flawed.
- Two regions a week, connected. Cover a new region Monday and a second Saturday, but on Sunday force yourself to compare them: why does one make a leaner wine than the other? Connections, not lists, are what survive under questioning.
Keeping the split honest
Section titled “Keeping the split honest”The most common failure at this pace is quiet drift — the tasting-lover who slowly turns Thursday’s service block into a third tasting, or the theory obsessive who skips tasting because reading feels productive. Guard the calendar. If you must cut a week short, cut proportionally from each skill rather than sacrificing your weakest one, which is exactly the one you can least afford to neglect.
Every four to six weeks, take your Sunday review a step further: run a longer mock — a full blind flight followed by a service scenario and a round of theory questions — to see how the three skills hold up together under pressure rather than in isolation.