For WSET spirits students
Savorant’s flavor families and the WSET Level 3 spirits tasting terms.
If you’re studying for a WSET spirits qualification, you already have a tasting grid. Savorant is a way to practice naming things between classes. Here is how its words line up with the WSET grid.
Savorant is not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by WSET. The WSET Level 3 Systematic Approach to Tasting Spirits and its lexicon belong to the Wine & Spirit Education Trust. Study from WSET’s own published grid. This page is our reading of how the two fit together, not a study guide.
The ten families against the WSET lexicon
WSET groups aromas and flavors by where they come from: the raw material, the processing, and oak and maturation. Savorant groups them by what they smell like. Most of Savorant’s families draw on more than one WSET group.
| Savorant family | Closest WSET lexicon terms | WSET group |
|---|---|---|
| Sweet | Corn (caramel, toffee); sugar cane (molasses); oak (vanilla) | Raw materials; oak and maturation |
| Fruity | Fruits; esters (banana, pear, pineapple); grape; aged fruit cake | Raw materials; processing; age |
| Floral | Floral notes from grape and from esters | Raw materials; processing |
| Herbal | Botanicals; agave and sugar cane herbaceous notes | Raw materials |
| Spice | Rye (pepper, allspice); botanicals; oak spice | Raw materials; oak |
| Woody | Oak (toast, cedar); age (wood polish) | Oak and maturation |
| Nutty | Oak (nuts, marzipan) | Oak and maturation |
| Grainy | Malted barley; corn; rye bread | Raw materials |
| Earthy | Age and rancio (leather, tobacco, mushroom, forest floor); earthy roots | Age; raw materials |
| Smoke | Smoke (peat, char) | Processing |
The WSET lexicon also covers faults, like solvent notes from heads and plastic or rubber from tails. Savorant teaches those as faults, kept apart from the families.
Structure: sweetness, heat, body and finish
WSET’s palate section asks for sweetness, flavor intensity, texture and finish. Savorant asks you to rate sweet to dry, heat, body, grip, bitterness, tartness and finish length, each on the same 15-point scale with labeled bands. The scales are different, but the questions are close:
- Sweetness: Savorant’s sweet-to-dry measure maps onto WSET’s dry to sweet.
- Texture: Savorant’s heat and body measures cover what WSET calls warming and mouthfilling.
- Finish: Savorant’s finish length maps onto WSET’s short to long.
What Savorant doesn’t do for WSET
It doesn’t assess quality, which WSET asks you to judge from faulty to outstanding. It doesn’t give a certificate or exam practice marks. It helps with the part that comes before: finding the word for what you’re smelling, anchored to something you already know, and finding out blind whether you can tell two spirits apart.
WSET says examiners accept other accurate descriptors as well as its own lexicon, so the words you build here are yours to use.