Congratulations to Mark Osburn for passing the Champagne Master-Level exam with the highest honors!
About Mark:
''I sometimes wonder if I enjoy the aspect of studying wine over drinking a glass. My wine career has been diminutive in the grand scheme of it all, so every time I discover a new field of wine, I soak it up. Through this, you quickly understand the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know. It’s a very humbling experience and I hope to never lose grasp of that.
I began my pursuit of wine in 2014 when I started working retail. Through this exposure, I joined a tasting group and catapulted myself into The Court of Master Sommeliers. Fast forwarding a year, I obtained my second-level certification and started working as a floor sommelier. As of right now, I’m aspiring to further my education in hopes to gear up for my advanced certification.
I would also love to implement my passion for writing, whether it’s a wine-related script or a book on the intricacies of champagne. As the years march onward, I want to be a passenger to the ever-changing world of wine. Writing a novel about the creative winemakers of Champagne and how their unique styles influence their wine is a distant, but achievable dream of mine. It’s all marketing and branding these days and Champagne seems to be losing touch with its heritage. A story is what makes wine great and I long to unearth the forgotten chapters buried within the soils of Champagne.
As mentioned above, Certified Sommelier is the only other title I currently hold. I have been gaining interest in the Institute of Masters of Wine and could see myself pursuing that in the near future. I very much approve the depth of material the Champagne Master Level course went into. Every class offered by the Wine Scholar Guild will be a necessity when I start actively pursuing tougher accreditations down the road.
Champagne is my main point of focus in the wine world and the amount of new material I discovered helped tremendously. It covered the history, viticulture, geology, climate, every aspect of Champagne. While I did master the provided material, it also opened new doors of independent learning within Champagne. Who would’ve thought I would be interested in selection massale and all things alike? Without this class, my understanding of Champagne would’ve been a mile wide and an inch deep. Now, I’ve burrowed deeper and will continue to dig until I’ve exhausted all the tools available to me.''