Secret silver

June 12th, 2014 | Competitions

IWC LondonThose of you who follow our site might already know my thoughts about wine competitions. I have very mixed views….. My opinion is that there are just so many variables involved that can ultimately affect the outcome.  The biggest problem can simply be how your wine performs in front of the judges. For example, it could be that you wine is recently bottled, recently sulphured, or perhaps it’s simply too young and not showing at its best. It’s position in the tasting line up can also influence how it is judged. If yours is a more subtle, elegant wine that finds itself in the middle of a selection of less subtle, more full-bodied, slightly sweeter, or perhaps even slightly more alcoholic wines, then it can quite easily be lost, or simply overpowered. The list of potential stumbling blocks goes on, so much so that in the end the result can become a bit of a lottery. Writing about a wine, offering the consumer a description and guiding them is one thing, but awarding medals based on a snapshot of how your wine shows at one precise moment in it’s life, well, that can sometimes be a bit misleading.

As a result of our frustrations with said competitions we simply chose to abstain completely from entering, but that’s not to say that our wines are never submitted. Of course it is the prerogative of our customers to decide whatever they chose to do in this respect, and of course we will always support their choice.

The other day I was surfing the internet, visiting a few wine websites (as I have been known to do on occasions), when I stumbled across a silver medal! It appears that our Bodega Castro Martin 2012 had won a silver medal at  the 2014 International Wine Challenge in London. We had no idea that it had won a prize, and didn’t even know that it had been entered – suffice to say that it came as quite a surprise…..

IWC LondonThose of you who follow our site might already know my thoughts about wine competitions. I have very mixed views….. My opinion is that there are just so many variables involved that can ultimately affect the outcome.  The biggest problem can simply be how your wine performs in front of the judges. For example, it could be that you wine is recently bottled, recently sulphured, or perhaps it’s simply too young and not showing at its best. It’s position in the tasting line up can also influence how it is judged. If yours is a more subtle, elegant wine that finds itself in the middle of a selection of less subtle, more full-bodied, slightly sweeter, or perhaps even slightly more alcoholic wines, then it can quite easily be lost, or simply overpowered. The list of potential stumbling blocks goes on, so much so that in the end the result can become a bit of a lottery. Writing about a wine, offering the consumer a description and guiding them is one thing, but awarding medals based on a snapshot of how your wine shows at one precise moment in it’s life, well, that can sometimes be a bit misleading.

As a result of our frustrations with said competitions we simply chose to abstain completely from entering, but that’s not to say that our wines are never submitted. Of course it is the prerogative of our customers to decide whatever they chose to do in this respect, and of course we will always support their choice.

The other day I was surfing the internet, visiting a few wine websites (as I have been known to do on occasions), when I stumbled across a silver medal! It appears that our Bodega Castro Martin 2012 had won a silver medal at  the 2014 International Wine Challenge in London. We had no idea that it had won a prize, and didn’t even know that it had been entered – suffice to say that it came as quite a surprise…..

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