This is a busy time of year for wine judges - Concours Mondiale finished yesterday, and this week in England both the Decanter World Wine Awards, and the International Wine Challenge are being held.
The competition this weekend went very well, our panel (with five judges from UK, Italy, Brazil, France and Portugal) judged around 150 wines. My favourite flight were the Provence roses, with Clos de Trois Sources from Coteaux d'Aix en Provence coming top. I also loved Domaine du Cagueloup from Bandol.
Felt perhaps it would have been fairer on the wines to know at least the country that they came from before the tasting - we had one flight, for example, from Moravia (east of the Czech Republic). All of the wines were very different in style from each other - different grapes, residual sugar, vinification etc, which made it tough to judge them as a whole flight. Knowing where they came from may have made it a more even playing field for them - but this is one of the debates of competitions of course, and perhaps on the the other hand allows each wine to stand 'on its own' without any pre-conceptions.
Decanter awards judge where the jury members know the region, but of course not the actual wines. Perhaps both have their merits.
.
