This year has been a great one for us here at Tesco Wine. Hundreds of our wines, including many from our Finest* range, stole the show at the 2011 world wine competitions, so there have been plenty of reasons to celebrate.
I love the excitement that goes with these annual wine contests as we find out the wine winners for the year and, fingers crossed, get a few awards too.
The three leading world wine competitions are Decanter, the International Wine Challenge (IWC) and the International Wine & Spirits Challenge (IWSC). This time round it’s been our best year ever – more than 300 of our wines won awards!
For those that don’t know, Decanter, IWC and IWSC are three separate contests but they all have one thing in common – experts, including winemakers, wine merchants, sommeliers, Masters of Wine and journalists are appointed to judge wines and spirits nominated by wineries and companies across the globe.
What’s more, the wines are tasted blind so the results are purely based on quality, as labels, brand names and bottles are concealed so these won’t affect the outcome. This is what makes winning an award one of the biggest accolades for us.
The competitions receive more than 10,000 entries from countries as diverse as China, Thailand, Brazil and Canada and the senior judges manage to sample over 200 wines every day during the judging period.
This year, our Finest* range did particularly well – over 100 Finest* wines won awards and some of our favourites won gold, which is a massive achievement, as only a limited number of wines from around the world pick up this accolade.
And to crown it all in October, Claire and I went up on stage at the awards ceremony of the IWC to collect not just the Trophy for overall Own Label range but 4 trophies in a row! Next year I will have my acceptance speech ready.
The medals from these contests are placed on labels on some of the winning bottles, which is a fantastic way to help you pick them up at a glance.
Our wines did so well this year, I can’t wait to see what 2012 has is store for us!