WineSage feedback is grounded in a purpose-built corpus of authoritative material:
- Expert-authored calibration and feedback logic for every question type on the practical paper
- Over a decade of official IMW exams and examiner feedback
- The Student Guide and syllabus
- A dedicated assessment framework
- More than 500 structured corpus entries
Every judgment WineSage makes is anchored to how the exam is actually written and how examiners actually mark it.
Just as important is what it doesn’t use. WineSage never draws on the open internet, wine forums, or Reddit threads, where accuracy and standards are inconsistent. If it isn’t drawn from the exam and its official record, it isn’t in the system.
Created by a Master of Wine — and calibrated relentlessly
WineSage was created by Neil Bernardi MW, who became a Master of Wine in 2024, working in close consultation with a group of experienced advisors to ensure the feedback holds true to the MW standard.
Behind WineSage sits a deliberate, fully documented calibration process: successive calibration sets with multiple iterations, hundreds of individually tagged practice sub-questions, and an ongoing process for improvement and recalibration using new student data. Every scoring refinement is logged and version controlled.
Alongside that documented record sits experience no document supplies on its own: lessons learned from countless practical tests and correction calibrations, and from marking student papers in seminars in the years since.
Built on more than a decade of official IMW exams and examiner feedback, the result is guidance that is consistent, exacting, and genuinely useful between attempts — the disciplined, examiner-style read that is otherwise hard to access on demand.