Written for candidates preparing for CMS or WSET tasting examinations.
Behind the dashboard's Grape Varieties & Growing Regions table sits a curated catalog of exam-relevant wine styles — the profiles worth practicing for each certification, assembled from the exams' published specifications. This page explains what the catalog covers and how your practice is measured against it.
Styles That May Appear
For most examinations, published lists describe styles that may appear — they are not a guarantee of what will be poured. Curate's catalog takes the same posture: it is practice coverage, not prophecy. The exception is CMS Certified, whose published List of Examinable Wines is a defined set; there, the catalog is the list.
Catalog Scope by Exam
Exam | Styles in the catalog |
WSET Level 2 | 72 |
WSET Level 3 | 124 — 71 essential, 53 optional |
WSET Level 4 (Diploma) | 304 — 206 essential, 98 optional |
CMS Certified | 51 — the defined list |
CMS Advanced | 102 |
CMS Master | the Advanced catalog, extended with esoteric varieties and regions |
Where a specification distinguishes essential from optional material, the catalog preserves the distinction — depth where the exam demands it, breadth where it merely permits it.
The sources are the exams' own published documents: the CMS-A List of Examinable Wines for Certified and List of Core Wines for Advanced/Master, and WSET's recommended tasting samples for each level — with the catalog refreshed as new specifications publish.
One scope note: the CMS catalogs are built on red and white wines. A session run as rosé, sparkling, or sweet & fortified still practices the format in full; it just won't map onto a CMS coverage row.
What a Row Is
Each row is one exam-relevant profile: a grape variety or style, its growing region, and the qualifiers that frame how it should show — oak regime, residual-sugar range, technique (carbonic maceration, skin contact, whole-cluster), vintage practice, and quality tier where a country's system puts one in play (Cru through Grand Cru, DOC and DOCG, Reserva and Gran Reserva, and their peers). Regional blends appear as such; a region-level row without a single grape is a legitimate exam object, and the table treats it as one.
Some specification lines offer a choice between genuinely different wines — one of two Madeira styles, say. The catalog carries these as alternatives within one entry, which matters mostly when planning exam costs: you study toward all of an alternative group, but exam-day provisioning needs only one bottle of it.
Exposure and Outcomes
The table joins the catalog to your history:
Exposure — how many tastings, distinct wines, and distinct vintages you've run against the profile. Zero exposure is the plainest gap there is.
Outcomes — of your blind sessions against the profile, how often your variety, region, and vintage conclusions were right, shown as success rates. Region and vintage grades carry the partial-credit semantics described on The Sommelier Dashboard.
The intended reading is a study loop: sort by exposure to find what you haven't met; sort by outcomes to find what you've met and misread; set up a blind tasting accordingly; return after the reveal and watch the row move. Coverage becomes confidence one linked session at a time.
Curate is an independent software provider, not affiliated with the Court of Master Sommeliers or the Wine & Spirit Education Trust, nor endorsed by either.