The Sommpour’s WSET Diploma D3 Audible Cheat Sheets, created by Anna Belani-Ellis, form a structured audio learning series following the official WSET Diploma D3 “Wines of the World” syllabus. Released progressively on Substack, the episodes can be streamed or downloaded, allowing students to study flexibly while maintaining continuity with the textbook. They are not summaries or shortcuts but explanatory tools designed to strengthen understanding of the causal links that define wine style, quality, and price, precisely the analytical reasoning required at Diploma level.
Each recording stays fully aligned with the syllabus and focuses on using facts rather than memorising them. It connects growing environments, grape-growing practices, and winemaking choices to their tangible outcomes in the glass, explaining how climate, soils, and viticultural or vinification decisions influence ripeness, acidity, concentration, texture, aroma, and ageing potential. The aim is to build logic-based understanding rather than lists of information.
Listeners are encouraged to use the recordings alongside maps, notes, and tastings, revisiting them later in their studies to refine reasoning and essay structure. The series begins with French regions such as Bordeaux, Burgundy, Beaujolais, Alsace, the Loire, and the Rhône, then moves through the South of France, South West France, and Jura before covering Germany, Austria, Tokaj, Greece and Italy in detailed regional sections. It concludes with comprehensive coverage of Spain. Each region is divided into focused episodes that explore geography, viticulture, winemaking, classification, and the business of wine production, providing a complete, syllabus-aligned companion to D3 study.
Even outside the context of exams, these episodes are also useful for wine drinkers and enthusiasts because they train you to connect what you taste to what happened in the vineyard and cellar, making regions, grape varieties and labels far more intuitive. That cause-and-effect approach helps you choose bottles with more confidence, understand why similar wines can taste different, spot the stylistic clues of climate and winemaking, and build a clearer mental map of classic regions, so the learning translates directly into more enjoyable, informed drinking.
