How Hard Is WSET Level 2? An Honest Guide to the Course and Exam
Let’s deal with the big question first. How hard is WSET Level 2? I’d describe it as achievable rather than easy.
You certainly don’t need to be a wine expert before you start. In fact, WSET specifically describes the Level 2 Award in Wines as a qualification for people with little or no prior knowledge, and there are no formal entry requirements.
But—and there is a but—it’s a proper qualification.
There’s more to learn than many students expect when they first open the textbook. One minute you’re happily discovering why Sauvignon Blanc tastes different in Marlborough and Sancerre. Next, you’re trying to remember whether Cortese belongs with Gavi, Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi belongs with Verdicchio and Montepulciano d’Abruzzo is a wine rather than a particularly cruel trick played on students by the Italian language.
Welcome to WSET Level 2.
The good news is that the individual concepts aren’t especially difficult. What tends to catch students out is the amount of material and the fact that you need to remember it accurately enough to recognise the correct answer when the exam puts four possibilities in front of you.
So, let’s look at what actually makes WSET Level 2 challenging—and how difficult you should expect it to be.
Is WSET Level 2 suitable for beginners?
Yes. And this is important, because I meet a lot of prospective students who look through the course material and immediately think:
Everyone else in that classroom is going to know far more about wine than I do.
Usually, they don’t. Some students work in restaurants, wine shops or hospitality. Some have been interested in wine for years. Others simply enjoy drinking wine and have decided they’d quite like to understand what on earth they’ve been drinking.
WSET states that Level 2 is intended for people with little or no prior wine knowledge. You don't have to complete Level 1 first, either. That doesn’t mean Level 2 is effortless. It means the course is designed to teach you the knowledge you need, rather than expecting you to arrive with it.
If you already know your Chardonnay from your Cabernet, that will obviously help at the beginning. But I've taught thousands of WSET students over the years, and previous wine knowledge is far less important than people imagine.
Curiosity helps. Doing some revision helps considerably more.
Why does WSET Level 2 sometimes feel difficult?
The main challenge is breadth. There’s quite a lot going on.
You’ll study the eight principal grape varieties: Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio/Pinot Gris, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir and Syrah/Shiraz.
Then there are another 22 regionally important grape varieties, wines from more than 70 geographical indications, sparkling wines, fortified wines, vineyard influences, winemaking, maturation, wine labels, storage, service and food pairing.
Written down like that, it can look slightly alarming, but you’re not studying all of those things to the same depth.
This is where understanding the WSET Level 2 specification and utilising it consistently in your studies becomes extremely useful. It tells you exactly what you're expected to know about each subject.
And increasingly, the course begins to fit together. Instead of treating every wine as a completely separate collection of facts, you start seeing patterns. A cool climate tends to preserve acidity. Warmer conditions generally allow grapes to become riper. Oak can contribute flavours as well as affecting the development of a wine. Different grape varieties behave differently depending on where they’re grown.
Once those connections begin to click, you have far less to memorise than you thought. That’s the point at which Level 2 becomes much more enjoyable.
How difficult is the WSET Level 2 exam?
The exam itself is fairly simple in structure. You have 50 multiple-choice questions and 60 minutes to answer them.
It is a closed book exam. Every question has one correct answer, each correct answer is worth one mark, and WSET does not subtract marks for incorrect answers.
The current grade boundaries are:
Pass: 55–69%
Pass with Merit: 70–84%
Pass with Distinction: 85% or above.
Because there are 50 questions, in practice you need at least 28 correct answers to pass.
And here’s something worth knowing if you’re worrying about the exam: there is no practical tasting examination at WSET Level 2.
You will learn to taste and describe wine using WSET's Level 2 Systematic Approach to Tasting Wine® (SAT), and tasting is an important part of learning the subject, but your qualification is assessed through the one-hour multiple-choice exam.
So you don't need to walk into the examination room, sniff a mystery glass and announce with terrifying confidence that it is a 2021 Puligny-Montrachet. Which I hope comes as something of a relief.
What is the hardest part of WSET Level 2?
For most students, it isn't winemaking. It isn't food pairing. It isn't remembering service temperatures.
It's keeping all the grapes, regions and wine styles straight in your head, and the exam weighting tells us that these areas really matter.
WSET publishes the number of questions allocated to each learning outcome. Learning Outcome 3—the principal grape varieties—accounts for 19 questions, while Learning Outcome 4—the regionally important varieties—accounts for another 12.
That’s 31 out of 50 questions.
So when students ask me what they should spend their time revising, the principal and regionally important varieties need to feature heavily. But—and I cannot emphasise this enough—don't interpret that as: “Excellent. I shall completely ignore food pairing.”
Four questions come from Learning Outcome 6, which covers storage, service and food pairing. Six come from sparkling and fortified wines. Five concern vineyard influences and grape growing. Four concern winemaking and bottle ageing.
Those are very gettable marks. Losing them because you've spent six hours memorising every corner of Bordeaux while refusing to learn what temperature to serve sparkling wine would be a shame.
Do you have to memorise loads for WSET Level 2?
There is certainly some memorisation involved. Wine education rather inconveniently contains names. Lots of names.
Grapes, regions, appellations, labelling terms and production methods all need to end up somewhere in your brain.
But students who try to learn Level 2 purely as a giant list tend to make life much harder for themselves. I would much rather you understand:
warm climate → greater potential ripeness → different fruit profile, acidity and potential alcohol
than memorise twenty unrelated descriptions of wines from warm places. Likewise, if you understand what oak, malolactic conversion, lees contact or bottle ageing can do to a wine, you have a framework you can apply repeatedly.
That's one of the biggest jumps students make during Level 2. At first, wine looks like thousands of facts. Then the patterns start appearing, and suddenly the whole thing feels considerably less chaotic.
Is WSET Level 2 harder than Level 1?
Yes, substantially. That shouldn't put you off.
Level 1 is designed as an introduction. Level 2 gives you a much broader understanding of the major wines of the world and expects much more detailed knowledge of grape varieties, regions and the factors affecting wine style and quality.
But you don't have to take Level 1 first.
WSET has no formal entry requirement for Level 2 and specifically positions the qualification as suitable for beginners as well as those building on introductory knowledge.
If you already have a reasonable interest in wine and are happy to put some study time in, going directly to Level 2 is perfectly normal. If the idea of learning dozens of grapes and regions fills you with absolute horror, starting with Level 1 might make for a gentler introduction.
There is no medal for choosing the highest level you can possibly survive. Choose the course that's right for where you are now.
How much studying does WSET Level 2 require?
Officially, WSET assigns 28 hours of total qualification time to Level 2.
That consists of 17 guided learning hours—including the exam—and 11 hours of private study. Treat that as a useful guide rather than trying to run your revision with a stopwatch.
Some students will need more. If you've worked in wine for five years and spend your days selling Burgundy and Barolo, quite a lot of the material may already feel familiar. If this is your first formal wine course and six weeks ago you thought Chablis was a grape, you may want to give yourself rather more time.
Neither is a problem. What matters much more is how you study. Twenty or thirty minutes of useful revision several times a week generally beats spending your entire Sunday staring grimly at the same page of the textbook while absorbing absolutely nothing.
Little and often works extremely well at Level 2.
The mistake that makes WSET Level 2 much harder than it needs to be
Cramming. Every educator has seen this. The exam is on Saturday. The textbook is opened with enormous enthusiasm on Thursday evening.
By Friday afternoon, the student has visited France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the USA, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand without leaving the kitchen table. At some point around midnight, Rioja Gran Reserva and Barolo begin merging into one enormous oak-aged nightmare.
Don't do this to yourself. Level 2 rewards repeated exposure. Read a chapter. Test yourself. Come back to it a few days later. Try some questions. Discover you've forgotten half of it. Go back. Try again.
That feeling of forgetting something is not evidence that you're terrible at wine. It is revision doing its job and showing you what needs another look.
Reading isn't the same as knowing
This is probably the single most useful thing I can tell someone studying Level 2.
You can read the textbook and think: Yes. Chardonnay. Obviously. I know Chardonnay.
Then somebody asks you a question comparing Chablis, Meursault and a warm-climate Australian Chardonnay, and suddenly Chardonnay has abandoned you entirely.
Recognition is not the same as recall. That's why I encourage students to test themselves fairly early in the course.
Close the book. Can you explain what you've just read? Can you name the regions? Can you describe the likely wine style? Can you answer a multiple-choice question without checking your notes?
That's when you find out what has actually stuck.
Are WSET Level 2 multiple-choice questions tricky?
They can be. Not because WSET is trying to catch you out with riddles, but because multiple-choice questions require precision.
You may recognise all four answers. Your job is to know which one actually answers the question.
The official specification contains five sample questions, and WSET says the full examination contains 50 questions similar to them. WSET does not publish previous Level 2 examination papers.
Practising good-quality multiple-choice questions is therefore very useful, but don't just bash through hundreds of questions chasing a percentage.
The valuable bit comes afterwards. When you get one wrong, work out why. Did you not know the information? Did you confuse two similar terms? Did you understand the topic but misread the question? Did the word most, least, typically or best pass you by?
That tells you much more than the score itself.
How hard is it to get a Distinction in WSET Level 2?
This is a rather different question from simply passing. A Distinction requires 85% or above. With 50 questions, that means you need at least 43 correct answers.
At that level, there isn't much room for fuzzy knowledge. You can't really have entire areas of the syllabus where your strategy is: “I hope they don't ask me about that.”
They might. If you're aiming for a Distinction, you want very broad coverage, regular question practice and particularly strong knowledge of the grape variety sections that make up most of the paper.
But I wouldn't become obsessed with the grade too early. Understand the course first. Build your knowledge. Start testing yourself. The scores generally follow.
How can you make WSET Level 2 easier?
There isn't a secret trick, but there is a sensible way to study it.
Use the official WSET textbook as your core resource and keep the current WSET Level 2 specification nearby. The specification matters because WSET explicitly states that examination questions are based on its published learning outcomes and that the recommended study materials contain the information needed to answer them.
Then make your revision active. Read something, then try to retrieve it without looking. Use flashcards for the material that genuinely needs memorising. Practise multiple-choice questions. Mix your topics as the exam approaches. And finally, sit complete 50-question mock exams under timed conditions.
You'll quickly discover which bits you know and which bits you've merely met before. There is a very big difference.
How Wine With Jimmy can help with WSET Level 2
A quick but important clarification here.
Wine With Jimmy is independent of WSET. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by WSET, and the revision questions and mock exams on Wine With Jimmy are independently created. They are not official WSET examination questions or past papers.
They're created from years of actually teaching this stuff.
I'm a Certified WSET Educator and hold the WSET Diploma. I've taught more than 6,000 students through WSET Levels 1, 2 and 3, and I own and run West London Wine School, a WSET Approved Programme Provider.
West London Wine School was also awarded the Riedel Trophy for WSET Educator of the Year for 2018. WSET described the school at the time as having established an outstanding reputation educating consumers and the wine trade.
I mention this because I feel it is simply important to know where independent revision material on Wine With Jimmy comes from.
I've spent a very long time watching students learn wine. I've seen the concepts they understand quickly, the bits that make everybody stare blankly at me, and the classic exam mistakes that come up year after year.
That's what the Wine With Jimmy Level 2 revision programme is built around.
It currently includes hundreds of Level 2 multiple-choice revision questions, chapter quizzes, flashcards, video lessons and full 50-question mock exams to help you test what you've learned alongside your official WSET study materials.
The point isn't to give you a shortcut around studying. I'm afraid I haven't invented one of those yet. It's to make the studying work better.
So, is WSET Level 2 hard?
If you do no revision and hope that enjoying Sauvignon Blanc is sufficient preparation, then yes, you're probably going to find it difficult.
If you read your course material, understand the main principles, give yourself time to learn the grapes and regions, and regularly test what you know, Level 2 is a very achievable qualification.
That's how I'd describe it after teaching it for many years: not easy, not frightening, but properly achievable.
There's a satisfying point during the course when things you used to see on wine labels suddenly mean something. You understand why Chablis doesn't taste like a heavily oaked Chardonnay from a warmer climate. You know why Barolo and Beaujolais are so different. You can look at a bottle you've never tried and make a fairly sensible prediction about what's inside.
That's when Level 2 stops feeling like an exam syllabus and starts becoming genuinely useful wine knowledge. And that, really, is the point. Don't study simply to remember 28 answers out of 50. Learn how wine works. The exam becomes considerably easier as a result.
WSET Level 2 difficulty: quick questions
Can a complete beginner pass WSET Level 2?
Absolutely. The qualification is specifically intended for people with little or no prior wine knowledge. You will, however, need to study outside the classroom.
Do I need WSET Level 1 before Level 2?
No. There are no formal entry requirements for WSET Level 2.
What is the WSET Level 2 pass mark?
The official pass threshold is 55%. With a 50-question paper, you therefore need at least 28 correct answers.
How many questions are in the WSET Level 2 exam?
There are 50 multiple-choice questions, with 60 minutes to complete them.
Is there a tasting exam at WSET Level 2?
No. Tasting forms part of the course, but the assessment is a one-hour closed-book multiple-choice examination.
How much revision should I do for WSET Level 2?
WSET specifies 11 hours of private study within the 28 hours of total qualification time. Some students will naturally need more depending on their starting knowledge and study style.
Is WSET Level 2 difficult to get a Distinction in?
A Distinction requires 85% or higher, which means at least 43 correct answers on a 50-question paper. It therefore demands accurate knowledge across the syllabus rather than relying heavily on a few favourite topics.
Written by Jimmy Smith: WSET Certified Educator · 20+ years in wine education · 6,000+ WSET students taught · Founder of West London Wine School, WSET Approved Programme Provider & WSET Global Educator of the Year