Course Review: Champagne MOOC by Comité Champagne

If you want to know more about the business and technical aspects of champagne, who better to learn from than the governing body of the region and the brand? This online learning platform is a great way to dive in deeper on all thing champagne, and the majority of the content is available with a free registration.

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Key Takeways

• The material covers mid-level information about the production process, terroir, history of the region and serving/tasting with nicely designed documents and quality videos in multiple languages.
• It’s self-guided and though there are message boards, they are not active.
• For €49, there’s some additional information and the opportunity to test your knowledge with an exam. (Though there’s nothing preventing you from cheating on the final test.)

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This is a web-based self-study program that includes nicely produced videos featuring industry experts like Denis Bruner from Bollinger, the historian Yves Tesson, and a number of people from the Comité Champagne. The footage in the videos is nicely shot and very much related to the subjectmatter, including vines, production facilities, and even how to properly open a bottle. There are also a number of helpful diagrams included as PDFs. Both the documents and the videos are available in multiple languages.

Admittedly, some experts were more comfortable in front of the camera than others. Most of them were speaking in English which isn’t their native language, so I didn’t mind the occasional stiff exchanges between people. And though the host was sometimes a little awkward, I found him charming.

The material is all delivered via a website which won’t win any design awards but was easy enough to use. While it isn’t optimized for mobile, it worked fine on an iPad. There’s no (obvious) way to download the videos so the content has to be consumed online. I did appreciate how the website automatically tracks progress so I could easily pick up where I left off.

It looks like the material was developed in 2018 so numbers may be slightly dated, but the concepts all still hold. The Message Boards seem long abandoned, but I didn’t feel like I was missing anything.

While a few of the videos seemed like they were intended for boosting tourism in Champagne, the majority of them were really insightful and had some very practical tips. Though I recently completed the in-depth Champagne Masterclass from WSG, I still learned quite a few things. All in all, this was €49 and several hours well-spent.