About SommPrep
Built from a Simple Frustration
The best wine textbooks in the world will tell you what a wine tastes like. Almost none will explain why. SommPrep exists to close that gap.
The Origin
The Question That Started Everything
It started with a glass of Chablis and a glass of Meursault, side by side. Both were Chardonnay. Both were from Burgundy. Both were well-made wines from excellent producers. They tasted nothing alike.
The textbooks said Chablis had “steely acidity” and Meursault was “rich and round.” True enough. But why? What specifically caused two wines from the same grape, less than 150 kilometers apart, to express so differently? The answer wasn’t in one place. It was scattered across geology texts, climate data, winemaking manuals, and the accumulated knowledge of professionals who’d spent decades building intuitions they could rarely articulate.
That question — that single, nagging why — became the seed of SommPrep.
“The difference between describing a wine and understanding a wine is the word ‘because.’ Most wine education never gets past description.”
The deeper I went into advanced wine study, the clearer the pattern became. The best tasters weren’t people who had memorized more facts. They were people who understood causal mechanisms — the specific chains of cause and effect that connect geology, climate, viticulture, and winemaking to what ends up in the glass. They could taste a wine and work backward through the algorithm, deducing origin, variety, and vintage from structural and aromatic evidence.
The problem was that this kind of thinking was almost never taught explicitly. You were expected to develop it through years of tasting experience, osmosis, and mentorship. The brilliant mentors existed, but their insights lived in private conversations and tasting notes, not in any structured learning resource.
SommPrep was built to make that expertise teachable.
Study for any advanced wine examination and you’ll encounter a particular kind of frustration. The textbook tells you that Barolo has high tannin. It tells you that Riesling has high acidity. It tells you that Châteauneuf-du-Pape is full-bodied. All true. All useless for building real understanding.
The moment everything changed was recognizing that every wine characteristic has a traceable cause. Barolo’s tannin isn’t a random fact — it’s the inevitable consequence of Nebbiolo’s skin chemistry, extended maceration protocols, and DOCG aging requirements. Once you understand why, you never need to memorize what again.
More importantly, you can transfer that understanding. If you understand why Nebbiolo produces high tannin from thin skins, you understand something fundamental about phenolic chemistry that applies to every red grape you’ll ever encounter. One causal insight replaces dozens of disconnected facts.
That’s when the project shifted from personal study notes to something much more ambitious: a comprehensive wine education resource built entirely around causal reasoning.
Founding Principles
What SommPrep Is Built On
Three convictions that shape every article, every tasting note, and every study tool on this site.
Explain, Never Just Describe
The single most common failure in wine assessment is describing without explaining. “Chablis has high acidity” earns a check mark. “Because Chablis sits at 47.8°N with 1,050 GDD, grapes retain high malic acid, resulting in pronounced racy acidity” earns distinction. Every piece of SommPrep content models the difference.
Patterns Over Facts
Facts are infinite. Patterns are finite. There are 15 master patterns that govern wine style across every region on earth. Learn these, and thousands of individual facts become predictable consequences rather than isolated data points. SommPrep teaches the patterns first — then shows how they play out everywhere.
Deduction, Not Guesswork
Blind tasting isn’t a party trick. It’s an exercise in systematic causal reasoning — working backward from sensory evidence to production origins. SommPrep’s tasting framework replaces intuition-based guessing with a structured, repeatable method that builds confidence through logic.
Setting Expectations
What SommPrep Is — and Isn’t
Not Another Textbook Rewrite
- × A certification body or exam provider
- × A replacement for tasting practice with real wine
- × A collection of facts to memorize
- × Beginner-level content dressed up as advanced
- × Generic study guides that describe without explaining
Your Analytical Operating System
- ✓ A causal reasoning framework for understanding any wine
- ✓ The companion that makes tasting practice meaningful
- ✓ Pattern-based learning that transfers across regions
- ✓ Genuinely advanced content for serious students
- ✓ The “why” behind every “what” — with data to prove it
The Method
How SommPrep Content Works
Every article, every tasting note, every comparison follows the same rigorous structure.
Start with the Cause
Every wine characteristic begins with a specific, identifiable cause — latitude, altitude, soil drainage, grape genetics, winemaking decisions. SommPrep identifies the precise input that drives each outcome, with quantified data: temperatures in °C, altitudes in meters, growing degree days, yields in hl/ha.
Trace the Mechanism
Knowing the cause isn’t enough. You need to understand how it creates the effect. Why does high altitude reduce temperature? How does reduced temperature affect ripening? What happens to acid metabolism when sugar accumulation slows? SommPrep walks through the biological, chemical, and physical mechanisms that connect cause to effect.
Arrive at the Observable
The endpoint is always something you can see, smell, or taste in the glass. The causal chain isn’t academic theory — it terminates in specific, detectable characteristics. High acidity. Pale color. Floral aromatics. Fine tannin. Every sensory marker traced back to its origin.
Test Through Prediction
Understanding is proven by prediction. Every SommPrep article includes prediction exercises that ask you to anticipate outcomes before they’re revealed, retrieval tests that challenge your causal reasoning, and comparison frameworks that sharpen differentiation. If you can predict, you understand. If you can’t, you know exactly where to focus.
A Living Resource
SommPrep is not a finished product. It’s a growing body of work — new regions, new varieties, new comparisons, deeper analysis. The wine world doesn’t stand still, and neither does this resource. Climate change is reshaping growing conditions. Winemakers are rethinking traditions. Markets are evolving. SommPrep tracks these changes because genuine understanding requires current knowledge, not just historical facts.
Every article is built to the same standard: causal reasoning, quantified data, contemporary relevance, and honest assessment. No filler. No padding. No repetition of conventional wisdom without scrutiny.
“The goal isn’t to give you answers. It’s to give you a way of thinking that generates answers — for any wine, in any context, under any pressure.”
If you’ve ever felt that the gap between what you’ve memorized and what you truly understand is the thing holding you back — SommPrep was built for exactly that moment.