Welcoming Justin Martindale MW

The love of wine and music often mesh.  Both arouse our senses and emotions; both appeal aesthetically; both console and nourish.  And they’ve done this since our earliest days.  The world’s oldest alcoholic residues, dating back 9,000 years, were found alongside flutes made from the wing bones of the red-crowned crane (in Jiahu, China).  Wine, music, firelight: bringing happiness, then as now.

The Wine Scholar Guild’s new Membership and Community Manager, Justin Martindale, continues this ancient tradition: he’s a clarinettist and singer who studied music at Leeds, one of Northern England’s most musical cities, and initially pursued a career as a professional singer before the wine virus tickled its way into his system (initially via Chilean Carmenère).  

“I loved the musical life,” he says, “but I wasn’t good enough. The talent of professional musicians is beyond anything else I’ve experienced.” But he sees clear links, he says, between his past and his present – and notably the way that both music and wine demand “brain power and intellectual agility” but also “require you to develop your senses: hearing for music and of course smell and taste for wine.”  

He may not have quite broken through to the top level as a singer, but he’s certainly a prodigious wine talent. After motoring up to WSET Diploma level while working for the British retailer Majestic, he then went on to found his own wine school in Edinburgh and cruised through his MW in 2022 with only a single one-part re-sit. Cruised?  Well … of course not. No one cruises through their MW. Justin likes to tell the story of how he got only 13% when he tried his first mock MW tasting exam back in 2016. Yet when he passed the tasting paper in 2019, he managed to unhook the Madame Bollinger Award for the best results. That dramatically improved performance is “something I’ll be forever proud of,” he confesses.

There was another break in cruise control, too. “The real low point,” Justin continues, “was the final research paper stage – as it coincided with the Covid pandemic. My wine school had to close, childcare was closed” – he and his wife Jessica have two young children – “and in terms of picking a topic, things became really difficult as there were obvious limitations around getting a group together to taste wines, for example, or getting to the library to study.” In the end he was canny enough to choose a subject bang on the Zeitgeist: ‘the evolving language of minerality in wine tasting’. And the handiest way to research its use was to track it through the Decanter magazine archive.  The study he produced won the Quinta do Noval Award for the best MW research paper of its year, and you can hear Justin talk more about the topic via the webinar he gave to WSG on 25th January 2023.

He sold his wine school 12 months ago. “I’d run it for 10 years and felt I’d achieved everything I could with it. Once I had the MW, it felt like it was time for a change.” Yet he was reluctant to leave wine education. “I love teaching -- and not just serious wine students, but also newer enthusiasts with much less experience. For the serious students, it always felt great to be able to contribute to their academic accolades and see them progress in their careers. And it kept my own knowledge sharp. For wine newbies, the most rewarding thing was seeing the spark ignite as they realised there was something really amazing about the world of wine. I have so many ex-students from my wine school days who came along to a taster session … and ended up graduating with their WSET Level 3 years later.”  

No surprise, then, that he’s very excited about getting back into wine education with Wine Scholar Guild’s growing Membership and Community cohort. “I think online communities are hugely valuable, particularly in our industry which is so global and full of regional idiosyncrasies. We are so lucky with our membership that we have expertise in local markets all around the world – it’s an amazing resource that I’m going to try and tap into more in the months ahead.” This MW is keen to follow WSG’s Masters programs himself, and help WSG “continue to make strides in the niche they have managed to carve out of the wine-education sector. It’s a hugely exciting time for the business.”

What’s he drinking to celebrate joining WSG? He says his store of Bollinger and Quinta do Noval (sponsors of his MW tasting and research paper awards respectively) is being rapidly depleted: no surprise there. More generally, his palate “has undergone such a revolution” since the days when he would race around Asda stores in Leeds buying up all the Carmenère he could find. “Nowadays I love Chardonnay, Riesling, Semillon for the whites and Rioja and wines from the South of France. I’m always on the lookout for value, so drink a lot of wines from Australia and NZ which can often more than compete with the best in the world. But more than anything these days I’m attracted to wines that have a sense of place and integrity. Sustainability is a huge passion of mine as well, so wines that have been farmed regeneratively are always high on my list.”

“Tasting and drinking,” he adds, after a moment’s reflection, “are very separate in my mind, and when I’m not in a professional environment I take a huge amount of pleasure from just opening and savouring different styles and flavours. I’m always on the look-out for something new or a bit different. And I always try and find the positives in every bottle of wine. Even if some have more than others!”