{"id":4443,"date":"2012-03-05T16:44:43","date_gmt":"2012-03-05T16:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=4443"},"modified":"2012-03-05T16:44:43","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T16:44:43","slug":"judging-at-the-sommelier-wine-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/uncategorized\/judging-at-the-sommelier-wine-awards","title":{"rendered":"Judging at the Sommelier Wine Awards"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sommelier<\/a><\/p>\n

Spent the day judging at the Sommelier Wine Awards, which is run by Imbibe<\/em> magazine. The idea is to award medals to\u00a0wines that deserve a place on a good wine list. As a result, we judge matched flights of wines ranging in price, and price is a consideration in determining whether the wine goes forward to next week’s medal-awarding stage.<\/p>\n

I was with a fun table, and so judging was a pleasure. We kicked off with a rather undistinguished group of New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs (a category that has some real highlights, but also a lot of middle ground), and followed this up with a flight of 14 Rhone whites.<\/p>\n

The Rhone whites were really interesting. Scoring out of 20, there was one wine I awarded 19, and a few got 18. An interesting mix of styles, including wines that were obviously Viognier, and those which seemed quite Marsanne dominated. I really enjoyed this flight.<\/p>\n

Then some Bordeaux left bank wines in the mid- to high-price range, which were a mixed bag. One was really bretty, and two bottles of another were both corked. But there were also\u00a0some very fresh, taut young wines with real finesse. With a run of good recent vintages, affordable Bordeaux is getting better, I reckon.<\/p>\n

What about southern Italian reds, the next flight? Disappointingly inconsistent. Not enough bright, modern, fruity, inexpensive wines of the sort that Puglia is becoming quite adept at these days. I did enjoy a couple of more expensive Aglianico-like wines (I\u00a0don’t know that they were; this is just a guess).<\/p>\n

Overall, we tasted 70 wines in 4 hours, and that felt about right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spent the day judging at the Sommelier Wine Awards, which is run by Imbibe magazine. The idea is to award medals to\u00a0wines that deserve a place on a good wine…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4443"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4450,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4443\/revisions\/4450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}