Don Kavanagh has no choice but to try all the eminent winners of a wine competition.
I’VE BEEN drinking cracking wine recently and it’s all down to Air New Zealand. Well, kind of.
The Air New Zealand Wine Awards is the major showcase of the year for our wines and it’s an exhaustive — and exhausting — event. With more than 1300 wines entered in the show, winning gold wasn’t an easy task, but 97 wines did just that and it’s those I have been enjoying for the past few weeks.
Competitions can be a bit of a puzzle for the consumer, with wine bottles often bearing several gold medal stickers on the front. These are to dazzle you into buying that particular wine, but a closer look often reveals that the competition is hardly premier league.
A&P shows in the back blocks of Australia and organic wine fairs in deepest Hungary don’t often attract a stellar field and to win gold at such a competition isn’t necessarily a stamp of excellence.
And there are so many of these shows all around the world; specialist grape variety competitions, supermarket wine competitions and competitions where the medal classes are so restricted that you basically get a medal for simply entering.
So how do you work out which are the best competitions? Well, in New Zealand it’s easy — either the Air New Zealand Wine Awards or the Royal Easter Show are good indicators of quality and they are the two biggest in the country. For Australian ones, look out for state capitals at the very least, as these tend to attract a bigger and better field.
Overseas, take your pick. Some, like the International Wine and Spirit Competition (IWSC) are very good, while others like the International Wine Challenge tend to be a bit too eager to splash the precious metals out for my liking.
But the Air New Zealand competition is the best guarantee of quality when you’re shuffling along the wine aisle at the supermarket. And the gold medal winners this year are excellent, with a good spread of regions and varieties among them.
Some wineries here choose not to enter competitions, often because they don’t really need to — their output will sell regardless. But for the smaller and lesser-known wineries the competition is a great chance to get some recognition.
The reason I can say with certainty that all the gold medal winners are good is simply that I’ve just finished the last one today. Boy, do I need a beer.
