International Wine Challenge

Posted on 11 April 2013

Tasting wine is hard work. Don’t believe me? Come to the International Wine Challenge in London. That’s 120 wines per day every day, in short concise flights, retasting each wine twice in different configurations to make sure your assessment is fair.

I’m in London for the week to do just that. Wine competitions generally suck – I’ve pretty much stopped doing them because they are so erratic. There was an American study that showed a wine gets as many medals in all competitions as it statistically would if they were attributed at random. That’s unless the competition is thoughtfully designed, planned and run, as the IWC is. We work in small juries of five headed by a master of wine or similarly experienced taster, and discuss each wine so that discrepancies are accounted for. This week we are basically shortlisting wines for medals which will be decided next week when all wines are retasted by different juries. Six competition chairmen retaste all wines to make sure no worthy bottle is overlooked. It is a tight procedure that produces reliable results.

I’ve sat on juries ably headed by John Worontschak and Victoria Sharples and we have gone through a very varied array of flights. All wines are tasted blind so I can’t tell you exactly, but from anegdotical evidence:

– 2011 Chablis and 2012 Alsace Riesling as well as 2012 Côtes du Rhône were consistent and reliably tasty. Apparently French wine has become like German cars.

– White and rosé NV Champagnes were all tasty while NV Cavas were all generally untasty.

– Argentine Malbec and Cab/Merlot blends were all solid and well-made at a bronze medal level but I wouldn’t drink any of them.

– Assorted Portuguese whites and reds were rarely exciting including a flight of pedestrian reds from Tejo and the worse that can happen to you is when people blend Cabernet Sauvignon with Touriga Nacional.

– Rioja was terrible. No other way to put it. Green, mean and nastily oaky. Ony my flight of 11 wines there was not a single nice wine.

– A good surprise came from Sardinia Vermentinos which were all poised, tasty, engaging and different.

– An even better surprise came from Georgia which presented a very solid flight of 10 whites and 1 orange; the latter was brilliant but other Rkatsitelis and Mtsvanes were balanced, engaging and flavourful. And there was even a good dry Tsolikauri, a grape I rarely like.

– A very bad surprise came from Casablanca Pinot Noirs which were all horrible and half actually suffered from various faults. Yikes.

– And then we had a fascinating flight of Other Reds that including a delicious Mexican Petite Sirah (likely from L.A. Cetto?), a green but juicy Ukrainian Saperavi, a Vranec from Kosovo that was quite pleasant, an overperforming Tannat from Peru, as well as a wine that was technically faulty but had the most glorious ripe silky fruit on the interminable palate, it smelled of Château Musar and tasted of Château Musar and it could only be Château Musar 2005. I hope it gets a Trophy because it sums up what is fascinating about wine: dimension.

I am travelling in London at my own expense to judge at the IWC.