The Concours Mondiale de Bruxelles opened this morning... in Bordeaux, confusingly. They have obviously decided that a good way to raise the profile of the competition is to go on tour, and last year held it in Maastricht, and Lisbon the year before that. The competition itself started back in 1994.
It's being held at the Palais de Congres in Bordeaux Lac, the conference area of the city (let's hope the visiting judges get some time to visit the far prettier downtown area), and is being run like a military operation (as I overheard someone say this morning, more D-Day than Iraq) - around 240 tasters from 45 different countries, in around 40 groups of between five and six. Between us, we are tasting over 6,200 wines (thank god that means split between all tasters) - a maximum of 50 samples in any one morning.
The flights of wines are drawn up according to:
• grape varieties or characteristics such as `still wines of red vines: Merlot’, `white sparkling wines of aromatic vines’, `dry rosy wines containing less than 4 reducing sugar gr/l’, etc
• according to geographical origin: `red wines of Bordeaux’, `sparkling appellation wines: Asti Spumante, etc
And so you know what the final medals mean:
• Grande Médaille d’Or : from 96 to 100%
• Médaille d’Or : from 87 to 95,9%
• Médaille d’Argent : from 82,5 to 86,9%
Usually around 30% of all the wines sampled are awarded medals.
29/05/08 @ 10:49