Un-Study Techniques: Your Five Minutes of Fame

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This is the third post in our series about “un-study techniques” for use in wine and spirits studies. For our first post, click here.  For our second installment, click here.

An un-study technique is an activity that will help you learn about what you need to know, but will NOT force you to crack open a book or flip over a flash card. An un-study technique is something you can do to help you learn about wine—in those times and situations when you are tired, unmotivated, or just plain sick of studying. We’ve all been there.

Here is this week’s idea; we call it Your Five Minutes of Fame. It works like this:

Instead of studying, pretend that you have an assignment to give a five minute presentation on wine (any wine, any subject). If you work with wine, assume that you are going to present to your employees or co-workers. If you don’t work in wine, let’s assume this is a five-minute talk given to students in an intro to wine class.

Your first step: Choose a topic. We’re just talking five minutes here, so you’ll need to choose a very specific topic. Here are a few ideas:

• The white grapes of Bordeaux
• Anjou rosés
• Subregions of Champagne
• Terroir of the Sonoma Valley AVA
• The noble grapes of Alsace
• Vin Santo
• Soave
• Chile’s east-west appellations
• Vinho Verde
• The Great Dividing Range
• Cool-climate regions of Australia

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Narrow it down: As you can see, it’s easy to come up with a topic. Your next challenge is to narrow your focus down so you can create a five-minute presentation! Keeping your presentation short will force you to focus on the most important pieces of information concerning a topic…in other words, you need to use your critical thinking skills to determine the context and relative importance of all of the available information.

Five key points: For a five-minute presentation, you can easily make five key points. (Don’t fret if you need to expand into plus-or-minus-one-or-two, such is life.) If you are presenting on the rosé wines of Anjou, you five key points might be:

1. Approximately 45% of Anjou wine is rosé (Anjou makes a range of wines, is most famous for Chenin-blanc based Vouvray, but rosé is a major product.)
2. The grapes (Cabernet Franc, Grolleau, Grolleau Gris, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Gamay, Pineau d’Aunis)
3. Cabernet d’Anjou AOC (Cab Franc + Cab Sauv, min 1.0% R.S.)
4. Rosé d’Anjou AOC (mainly Grolleau, min 0.7% R.S.)
5. Rosé de Loire AOC (produced throughout the Central Loire, but a good choice for a dry rosé at a maximum 0.3% R.S.)

That’s it!

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Keep it Simple: This caveat has nothing to do with your (pretend) audience, but rather this simple truth: you can’t explain something in clear, concise terms unless you have a true understanding of the subject. Anyone can ramble on about a topic…but only someone who really understands the topic can distill it down to a sentence or two. Albert Einstein said it better than I can, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Slides, slides, everywhere the slides: Whether or not you use power point or other types of slides “in real life” – this is a good exercise in consolidating your information and keeping this concise. So…make a slide deck with five slides only, and one of your key points per slide. (When you are done, you can add in an introductory slide and a conclusion, we won’t tell anyone.) Remember to stick to the “real rules” of slide design and do not fill them with words (no fair “reading slides” during your presentation.) Find a photo or make a graphic, and use a statement or two. Use the notes page of the slide to fill in as much detail as you want—this is where a lot of your “un-study” learning will come in.

Learn-by-teaching, learn-by-practice: Practice your presentation and have fun with it! You’ll soon experience the learn-by-teaching effect. Give the presentation to your family, friends, teddy bears, or the mirror. Record yourself and play it back. The point here is to internalize the information until you can talk about the subject naturally and with confidence…to the point where you could give the presentation extemporaneously. Once you’re there, you’ve learned the material—un-study techniques in action!

The Bubbly Professor is “Miss Jane” Nickles of Austin, Texas… missjane@prodigy.net