WSET Level 2 Past Papers: Can You Get Them — and What Should You Practise Instead?
If you’re studying for the WSET Level 2 Award in Wines, there’s a fair chance you’ve typed “WSET Level 2 past papers” into Google at some point.
It’s an understandable thing to look for.
You’ve got 50 multiple-choice questions standing between you and your qualification, so getting hold of a couple of previous exams feels like a sensible way to prepare. You could see what comes up, get used to the wording and work out whether you’re ready.
Unfortunately, there’s a slight problem.
WSET doesn’t release past papers for the Level 2 Award in Wines.
That comes directly from WSET. The current Level 2 specification states that the Wine & Spirit Education Trust “does not release past papers” for this qualification. Instead, WSET publishes five sample examination questions to give candidates an idea of the sort of questions they might encounter.
So if you’ve been hunting around online for an official archive of previous WSET Level 2 exams, you can stop looking. It doesn’t exist.
The better question is: if you can’t practise with real WSET Level 2 past papers, what should you practise with instead? That’s what we’re going to look at here.
What official WSET Level 2 exam material can you use?
Your first port of call should be the WSET Level 2 Award in Wines Specification. I know. A specification doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as getting hold of an old exam paper, but from a revision point of view, it’s incredibly useful.
WSET states that all examination questions are based on the published learning outcomes. In other words, the specification sets out what you can actually be tested on. WSET also says its recommended study materials contain the information required to answer those questions. That makes the specification one of the best revision checklists you have.
Level 2 covers a lot of ground: grape growing, winemaking, the principal grape varieties, regionally important varieties, sparkling and fortified wines, labels, storage, service and food pairing. It can feel like a fairly enormous collection of facts when you first start learning it.
The specification gives that information boundaries. If something sits within the published learning outcomes, you need to know it. If it doesn’t, there’s very little benefit in disappearing down a wine-geek rabbit hole three days before your exam. And believe me, wine provides plenty of rabbit holes.
You can find the current qualification information on WSET’s official Level 2 Award in Wines page, which also links to the latest specification.
What does the WSET Level 2 exam actually look like?
The Level 2 exam is refreshingly straightforward in its format.
You have:
50 multiple-choice questions.
60 minutes.
One correct answer for each question.
It’s a closed-book examination and each correct answer earns one mark. Importantly, WSET does not deduct marks for incorrect answers. You need 55% to pass.
The current grade bands are:
Pass: 55–69%
Pass with Merit: 70–84%
Pass with Distinction: 85% or above.
And there’s another point that sometimes causes confusion: there is no practical tasting examination at WSET Level 2.
You will taste wines as part of the course and learn to use the WSET Level 2 Systematic Approach to Tasting Wine® (SAT), but the qualification itself is assessed through that single 50-question theory exam. So when it comes to exam preparation, your job is very clear.
You need to get good at answering multiple-choice questions across the whole syllabus.
Not all parts of the syllabus carry the same number of marks
This is one of the most useful things in the WSET specification, and surprisingly few students make proper use of it. WSET tells you roughly how the 50 questions are distributed across the six learning outcomes.
The current weighting is:
| Learning Outcome | Questions |
|---|---|
| LO1: Vineyard environment and grape growing | 5 |
| LO2: Winemaking and bottle ageing | 4 |
| LO3: Principal grape varieties | 19 |
| LO4: Regionally important grape varieties | 12 |
| LO5: Sparkling and fortified wines | 6 |
| LO6: Storage, service and food pairing | 4 |
That adds up to your 50 questions.
Have another look at the middle of that table.
Learning Outcomes 3 and 4 account for 31 of the 50 questions.
That’s a very substantial chunk of the exam devoted to understanding the principal and regionally important grape varieties, the places they’re grown and the styles of wine they produce.
That doesn’t mean you can ignore everything else. Five marks lost because you decided vineyard influences were boring are still five marks lost, but it does mean your revision should reflect the structure of the exam rather than giving every page of the textbook exactly the same amount of attention.
What do WSET Level 2 multiple-choice questions actually test?
This is where I think students occasionally get the wrong idea about Level 2. It is certainly a knowledge-heavy qualification. There are grape varieties, regions, labelling terms and wine styles that simply need to be learned, but good Level 2 knowledge isn’t just memorising pairs of words.
Marlborough = Sauvignon Blanc.
Barolo = Nebbiolo.
Sauternes = sweet.
Those associations matter, but you also want to understand why the wines are the way they are. What happens to acidity and sugar as grapes ripen? What difference would you expect between Chardonnay grown in a cool climate and Chardonnay from somewhere warmer? What happens when a wine undergoes malolactic conversion? Why might a winemaker use oak? How does noble rot affect grapes? What style of wine would you expect from a particular grape variety in a particular region?
Once you understand those relationships, lots of individual facts become much easier to remember. And you’re far better equipped when a question is phrased differently from the one you happened to practise the night before.
So should you use WSET Level 2 sample papers?
Yes — as long as we’re clear about what we mean by a “sample paper”. The five mock questions WSET publishes in the specification are official examples. They show you the general format and level of questioning you can expect.
But five questions obviously aren’t enough to revise an entire qualification. That’s where independently written practice questions and mock exams become useful.
The important thing is that they should be treated as exactly that: practice.
They aren’t leaked WSET questions. They aren’t old WSET papers with a different logo stuck on them. And they can’t tell you what will appear in your actual exam. A good mock exam has a different purpose. It should test whether you know the syllabus well enough to answer a broad range of questions without your book sitting open beside you.
Start practising questions before you've finished revising
This is probably one of the biggest things I’d change if I could sit alongside every Level 2 student while they revise.
Don’t wait until you feel ready before you start doing questions. Use the questions to get ready.
Students will quite often work through the textbook from beginning to end, spend days making beautiful notes and only then try a mock exam. At which point they discover that the chapters they read three weeks ago have largely evaporated. That’s normal.
Reading something and recognising it is very different from being able to retrieve it from memory.
So test yourself as you go. Finish studying Pinot Noir? Do some Pinot Noir questions. Just revised Germany? Test Germany. Spent an evening learning sparkling wine? Close the book and find out what you can actually remember about Champagne, Cava, Prosecco and Asti. Then come back to those topics again a few days later.
That process of having to retrieve information is far more revealing than simply rereading your notes.
When you get a question wrong, don't just learn the answer
This is where practice questions become genuinely useful.
Suppose you answer a question incorrectly and discover the answer was Chablis. Writing down “Answer = Chablis” isn’t particularly helpful. You want to know why you chose the wrong answer. Did you confuse Chablis with another Chardonnay-producing region? Did you misunderstand a labelling term? Was there a piece of knowledge you simply hadn't learned? Did you miss the word most or least in the question? Were there two answers that looked plausible and you couldn't distinguish between them?
Those are different problems. And once you identify the problem, you can actually fix it.
I find it particularly useful to go back to the relevant part of your WSET materials after a mistake and revise the surrounding topic, rather than just memorising the individual answer.
Otherwise there’s a danger that you get very good at answering that particular question without actually becoming much better at wine.
Be careful with multiple-choice questions you find online
There are plenty of WSET Level 2 quizzes floating around online. Some are useful. Some are less so.
The problem is that a multiple-choice question can look perfectly plausible while testing something outside the syllabus, using outdated terminology or being based on an older version of the qualification.
And sometimes the question is simply wrong. That’s another reason to keep the current WSET specification close by when you revise. If you come across a question and find yourself thinking ‘Do I actually need to know this?’ check.
WSET explicitly says that its exam questions are based on the published learning outcomes. There’s enough to learn at Level 2 without accidentally revising somebody else’s favourite obscure wine fact.
When should you start doing full mock exams?
Not immediately. If you’ve only studied half the course, sitting a 50-question paper covering the whole syllabus isn’t necessarily going to tell you very much.
Topic-by-topic questions are usually more useful early on.
As you get further through the course, start mixing things together. That matters because the real exam doesn’t politely give you ten questions on Chardonnay followed by ten on Cabernet Sauvignon. You might go from Sherry to Burgundy to vineyard influences to food pairing in the space of four questions.
Your brain has to learn to switch subjects. Then, once you’ve covered the syllabus, start sitting complete 50-question mock exams. And sit them properly. Give yourself 60 minutes. No textbook. No Google. No checking the answer after question six because it's annoying you.
Finish the paper and then review it.
You may well find you finish substantially inside the hour, but practising under exam conditions is still useful. It removes the safety net and shows you what you genuinely know.
Don't waste marks by overthinking the exam
Level 2 multiple choice can produce a peculiar phenomenon. Students sometimes know the answer, then talk themselves out of it.
They spot the correct option immediately. Then they look at another answer. Then another. Three minutes later they’ve constructed an elaborate argument for why the grape variety traditionally associated with one region might, under a very unusual set of circumstances, perhaps be grown somewhere else as well.
Remember what you're being examined on. The questions come from the Level 2 learning outcomes.
Read the wording carefully. Decide what knowledge the question is testing. Eliminate answers you know are wrong and choose the best answer from those provided.
And because WSET doesn’t subtract marks for an incorrect answer, there is no advantage in leaving a question unanswered.
Where can you get legitimate WSET Level 2 practice questions?
This is the point where I want to make the same distinction I make with all of the revision material on Wine With Jimmy.
Wine With Jimmy is independent of WSET. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by WSET, and the practice questions and mock exams I create are not official WSET past papers.
Everything is independently written. But it’s also worth explaining what “independently written” means in this case.
I’m a WSET-qualified wine educator and have spent many years teaching students taking WSET qualifications. I own and operate West London Wine School, which has taught thousands of wine students and operates as a WSET Approved Programme Provider.
In 2018, West London Wine School won the Riedel Trophy for WSET Educator of the Year. WSET described the school as having established an outstanding reputation educating both consumers and the wine trade.
That experience is what sits behind the Wine With Jimmy Level 2 revision material. I can't tell you which 50 questions WSET will put in front of you on your exam day. Nor should anybody else be claiming they can.
What I can do is create questions that make you practise the knowledge contained in the specification, expose the areas you've forgotten and get you accustomed to retrieving that knowledge in a multiple-choice format.
The Wine With Jimmy Level 2 revision programme includes hundreds of multiple-choice practice questions, topic-by-topic quizzes, full mock examinations, flashcards, revision videos and exam-technique support designed specifically to supplement your official Level 2 course materials.
The aim isn't to memorise a bank of questions. It's to know the course well enough that it doesn't matter which questions you get.
A better way to think about WSET Level 2 past papers
I completely understand why students want past papers. They make an exam feel less mysterious. You want to see what came up last time, spot the pattern and walk into the exam feeling as though you know what's coming.
But WSET doesn't release Level 2 past papers. And once you accept that, I think there’s actually a much better way to prepare.
Use the official specification to understand what can be tested. Use WSET's five sample questions to familiarise yourself with the format. Then answer lots of good-quality, independently written practice questions across the entire syllabus. Do them by topic first. Mix the topics together later. Sit full 50-question mocks as the exam gets closer. And every time you get something wrong, work out why.
The question I’d want you to be able to answer before exam day isn't: “Have I seen this question before?”
It's: “Do I know enough about this subject to work out the answer?”
That's a much more useful kind of confidence, and unlike a folder of WSET Level 2 past papers, it's something you can actually build.
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