How to Get the Most Out of Your Wine Textbooks With the 3 A's
Alright! You just signed up for a new wine course and picked up your shiny new textbook. Now you’re ready, with highlighters, flashcards and pens at hand, to dive on in!
Or not…..
Maybe you’re on the other end of the enthusiasm-dread spectrum, wondering how in the world are you ever going to learn all this stuff? And where do you even begin?
Whether you are all hyped and raring to go or sitting at the base of a mountain looking up, you’re going to get so much more out of your time with your textbook if you practice the 3 A’s.
This technique is adapted from our college days and Mr. Hickey’s English 101 course where we were introduced to Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren’s guide “How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading” (Amazon Affiliate link)
If you want to get the most out of your textbook, and actually retain the information for your exams, you need to interact with the text repeatedly—but each time with a different focus. Hence the 3 A’s—Acclimate, Analyze, Adsorb.
UGH! Are you seriously telling me I have to read this freaking thing three times?!?!
Yes! But it’s not as daunting as you may expect. That stressful, trying-to-cram-stuff-in-your-head reading doesn’t happen till the second go-thru in the Analyze round—which you were already planning to do. However, by sandwiching it between the other two A’s, Acclimate and Adsorb, you’re going to get a heck of a lot more out of that time and effort you put into your hardcore reading.
Let us explain, starting with the first “A”.
Acclimate - A Drive Through the New Neighborhood
With this reading, you’re just introducing yourself to the new text. No highlighters. No note pad or flashcard making. No annotating in the margin. Just read through the section, chapter, unit or whatever that you’re aiming to get through.
The purpose of this run-through is to quiet your brain from distractions.
It’s very easy when approaching new material to want to constantly stop to look something up (What do they mean by oxidative winemaking?), write things down (The Mauges hills, whatever the heck they are, shelters Savennières from Atlantic influences), jump ahead (Let me Google some notable Vouvray producers), go back (Is Savennières dry or sweet?), etc. Stop and go. Stop and go. That’s mentally taxing and, yeah, you can see why folks dread it. But we’re not going for that here.
Instead, you want to approach this first reading more as a casual drive through a new neighborhood. We’re not stopping to take pictures but there is still a lot you can get from this sight-seeing expedition. For one, you’re developing a familiarity with the “vibe” of the neighborhood, the language, flow and structure of the text.
But you’re also getting an early preview of potholes and trouble spots that you’ll have to deal with. While you’re not going to stress about them at this moment, this early awareness will help you navigate them more carefully when you encounter them again.
Which brings us to….
Analyze - Reaching for higher level fruit
For your second run through the text, this is when you take your time and make notes. It’s the type of reading that you’re probably already very familiar and well versed in doing but you might be surprised at how much more smoothly the process will go this time.
That’s because you’re going to be far less likely to make redundant notes pertaining to material that comes up later in the text—the text that you’ve already read through once before. While you haven’t studied anything too deeply, there will be things that you’ve absorbed from that first acclimation read. This is the low-hanging fruit that you would have previously spent extra time highlighting and annotating if you just originally dived in.
But by letting those low-hanging fruit details shake themselves out and fall into the basket on their own, now when you stop in your readings to look up details, write things down, you’re reaching for more bountiful fruit—the type of fruit that can make a meaningful impact on your exams.
Plus, now you know where there are going to be some trouble spots—which you can adjust for in your study plan. If certain areas like fining & filtration, Central Italy or La Place de Bordeaux gave you pause during your first read-through, you can plan ahead to give yourself more time to really dig into the material and concepts. While, on the flip side, you also know that there will be other areas that won’t need as much hard brainpower to work through.
Even If you’re the type who likes to dive on in—doing that first Acclimate Read Thru will help you make the most of your study time. And we all know study time is a precious commodity.
But to take it to the next level, you want to come back for Round 3—ideally in the last couple of weeks before an exam. This brings us to…
Adsorb — Getting Sticky With It
The spelling is intentional because we’re not talking about absorbing. When you absorb something, you’re taking it in like a sponge. But, wait, isn’t that how we learn? Soaking it in? You would think it would be that easy but, unfortunately, there is a nagging little handicap inside us all constantly squeezing out that sponge called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.
The long and short of it is that our brains are wired to quickly forget things. Like immediately the next day you’re already forgetting stuff that you learned the day before. In fact, studies have shown that students will lose around 90% of what they learn within a week. YIKES! How in the world do we deal with this dreadful news?
The answer to combatting this forgetting curve is not to just keep wetting the sponge but rather to toss it into a bucket and start applying adhesives over the leaks. This is the aim of spaced repetition and going through the material again (and again)—to make it stickier.
In those last crucial weeks before an exam, you really don’t want to be learning new material.
Cramming is playing Russian Roulette with the Forgetting Curve—and, believe us, the chamber ratio is not in your favor.
However, if you’ve been following the 3 A’s, you’ve already gone through the material twice. Now as you return to it you don’t have to analyze it as hardcore as you did in the 2nd read-through. Instead, this is the time where you focus more on making connections between concepts (which helps create new memory links) and developing memory devices that are relevant to you. All tried and true antidotes to the Forgetting Curve.
But even if you’re not “creative” with making memory devices and connections, simply going back through the text and re-reading your notes offers immense benefits that you shouldn’t pass up.
It’s akin to retracing your steps or rewatching a movie. Not only will different details pop out, but the details that you already knew will take on more meaning and context. And just like tracing an image over and over again, those mental lines etched in your memory banks will get darker and more solid with the repetition.
In a perfect world, you’d have a perfect study plan where you could review everything multiples times before an exam.
But we know that rarely happens so we have to be realistic. However, following the 3 A’s is not stretching the realm of realistic for most wine students. You know that you’re already going to do that one hardcore, deeply analytical read-through of the material. That’s a given.
You also know that you’re likely going to be reviewing things right up to the eve of the exam. Another given.
All we’re asking is that you try to give yourself a breather by not diving right in, peddle to the metal. And for those of you at the base of the mountain, dreading where to start, it truly begins with just turning a page.
The beauty of the 3 A’s is that it only asks for that little extra investment of being willing to casually read through the material at the beginning—making your 2nd read-through so much more fruitful (and less intimidating!). And then when you go back to review just before the exam, you know why you’re doing it (adsorbing) and have a path retrace which will help you focus better on making things stick.
Then you can walk into your next wine exam telling the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve to “Forget You.”