Elegantly set in City Chambers the lesson starts, encouragingly, with a glass of bubbly and salty aperitifs, although you will have to forgive the cheesy music. Little time is wasted, and you will be tasting several wines, the worst of which is rather good and the best of which are stunning.
The lesson naturally revolves around the essential techniques of inspecting and sampling the wines, but there are also relevant points of geography, history, and botany in moderate yet useful amounts — enough to pique your interest and clue you in, nothing boring or gratuitous. The hostess is bright and chatty and mercifully not addicted to impenetrable and lofty adjectives. Despite what you might think, this is not a snobbish event (unless, of course, many snobs attend).
What lifts this event above some other wine tasting session is the ingenuity of the selection. If you are at all attentive to taste and smell you will be taken on a highly dynamic sensory journey. One wine differs to the next markedly, there are whole dimensions of flavour to explore and what Edinburgh Wine School has achieved is to bring the distinct character of each bottle into sharp relief by being carefully grouped.
Don’t be put off by the comparatively expensive ticket, if you mentally subtract the price of a few glasses of wine this lesson is excellent value for money. You will finish the session happier, wiser, and probably more than a little drunk.
5/5 
Bernie Greenwood
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