Category Archives: wine awards

If You Know, You Know: Discovering Virginia’s Wines One Case at a Time

August 5, 2025 By in wine, wine awards, Wine Competitions 2 Comments

If you know, you know. If you don’t, you probably don’t. That’s the way it is with the wines from Virginia.

Guess Again

How many wineries do you think there are in Virginia? Virginia is a more important wine-producing state than most people imagine. There are 386 wineries in Virginia, according to the Wine Business Monthly annual “Review of the Industry” issue. That places Virginia at #7 in the U.S. winery league table behind New York and Pennsylvania and ahead of Ohio and Missouri (two states with serious wine history). Virginia is a long way behind California (over 4700 wineries), but so is everyone else.

If you don’t live in Virginia or visit there frequently, like we do, Virginia probably never shows up on your wine radar screen. Indeed, there are Virginians who don’t appreciate the wines from their state. Most of the wineries are small, scaled to supply the amount of wine they can sell at the cellar door and through limited self-distribution channels.

Sometimes events and hospitality services take center stage from a business standpoint with the winery, vineyards, and the wine in a supporting role. There’s good money in hosting weddings, corporate retreats, and cooking classes, and good opportunities to sell wine. Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards and Early Mountain Vineyards are two very successful destination wineries that follow this model.

Sue and I don’t see many Virginia wines on restaurant lists or store shelves when we visit Virginia. The Wegmans upscale supermarket near Richmond that we often visit has an impressive global wine selection and the best Virginia aisle that we have seen, but I don’t think more than a dozen or so of the 386 wineries are represented. It just wouldn’t make economic sense for either the store or the wineries to do much more, given the thousands of bottles from around the world already on the shelves.

The Governor’s Cup Case

How do you draw attention to a wine region like Virginia in today’s crowded marketplace? Well, there is no single silver-bullet answer to this question and from what we have seen the Virginia industry is taking a multi-prong approach starting with individual winery self-promotion and extending up through regional and state-wide initiatives.

The Virginia Governor’s Cup competition is organized by the Virginia Wineries Association in partnership with the Virginia Wine Board and the Virginia Vineyards Association. The competition showcases the depth, diversity, and quality of Virginia wines.  This year the judges considered 620 wines, ciders, and meads from across the state and awarded 155 gold medals (90 to 100 points) from 87 wineries.

Each year the top 12 wines from the competition are designated for the Governor’s Cup Case. That’s a large enough sample of the top wines to be representative but small enough to be manageable. Sue and I were fortunate to receive a case in 2024 and again this year. We reported on the 2024 experience in this Wine Economist column. Here are the wines in this year’s case.

2025 Governor’s Cup Case Winners

What have we learned about the state of Virginia wine from our limited winners cup case experience? Herewith a few observations.

Always something there to surprise us. Virginia wine is definitely not a clone of any other state or region. You can find Petit Verdot and Petit Manseng in other regions but they seem to be particularly suited to Virginia’s climate. Winemakers are experimenting with different styles and blends. Lots of good surprises to reward the adventurous drinker. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, someone who is bored with Virginia wine is bored with life.

Virginia Classics. Cabernet Franc is the most-planted red grape in Virginia and the 2025 case shows why. The wines were interesting, different, and so well balanced! A classic grape for Virginia. There are also classic wineries. Barboursville Vineyards ignited the modern Virginia wine movement when it was founded (by Italy’s Zonin family) in 1976. The Barboursville Vermentino Reserve was the top wine in 2025 and the BDX blend Octagon was also featured. Barboursville planted the first Cabernet Franc vines in the state. We drink these wines whenever we find them. If you know, you know. King Family Vineyards and Michael Schaps, the Virginia Chardonnay master, are classics, too, and there are many more.

And Newcomers, Too. We’ve been impressed with the wines that newer and smaller wineries have contributed to the Governor’s Cup Case each year. We’ve been fortunate to sit in on virtual conversations with the winning winemakers moderated by the talented Frank Morgan, who organizes the competition each year. The winemakers and winery owners we have met via Zoom impress us as sophisticated in their technical knowledge and committed to the highest standards of quality.

The elephant in the room. You might have noticed that a Trump wine is included in the winner box and you might have wondered, because that’s the kind of world we live in, if this is some sort of political statement. It’s not. Trump wines have been featured in the winners box off and on for many years. The Trump family purchased the well-known Kluge Estate Winery in a foreclosure auction in 2011. The Kluge wines were well-regarded and the Trump wines, especially the sparklers, have a strong reputation. This wine made the winners case on merit. That said, I don’t know if consumers will choose to buy the wine (or visit the winery) because of the wines themselves or the Trump association (see this recent New York Times column by Eric Asimov).

Early Mountain update. This is a good opportunity to provide an update on Early Mountain Vineyards. Sue and I, along with her parents, visited Early Mountain back in 2013 and the project seemed like a work in progress. Jean and Steve Case had recently purchased the bankrupt Sweely Estate winery and were operating the renamed facility mainly as a hospitality and event venue (see above). They did not have any of their own wine to pour or sell in the tasting room! A winery without wine! That’s not quite true, however, because they served nice wines from some other Virginia wineries. Now the Early Mountain wine program is firing on all cylinders and we have enjoyed the opportunity to taste three of the wines: the Eluvium red blend (Merlot, Petit Verdot), Intention white blend (Petit Manseng and Sauvignon Blanc), and Quaker Run Chardonnay. It seemed like the 2020 Intention might have needed more aging to come together as intended, but taken together the wines tell the story of Virginia’s rapid rise very well.

If you know (about Virginia wine) you already know.

A Volta ao Mundo em 80 Vinhos Named Best Wine Book Translation

June 24, 2025 By in globalization, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine, wine awards 5 Comments

The Portuguese translation of my book Around the World in Eighty Wines has received an award. A Volta ao Mundo em 80 Vinhos, published in Brazil by Editora Valentina, was named best wine book translation by Gourmand International.  The book is available from the publisher as well as through the usual online sellers, including Amazon.com in the United States.

I am grateful to Gourmand International founder Edouard Cointreau and to the team at Editora Valentina. Special thanks to everyone who helped me write and publish the original book! Here is the Gourmand Awards press release.

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A Volta Ao Mundo em 80 vinhos – Best Wine Book Translation in the World

A Volta Ao Mundo em 80 vinhos, by Mike Veseth and translated by Editora Valentina, was named Best Wine Book Translation in the World at the Gourmand Awards, during the Cascais World Food Summit in Portugal.

The announcement was made on stage at the Estoril Congress Centre by Edouard Cointreau, President and Founder of the Gourmand Awards, who praised the work for its depth and cultural significance:

“Congratulations to Mike Veseth on the Brazilian edition of Around the World in Eighty Wines, a true masterpiece that blends travel, culture, and wine into a captivating global adventure. Inspired by Jules Verne’s classic, Mike takes readers on an unforgettable journey across continents, exploring the stories behind eighty wines that reveal not just the richness of terroirs, but also the spirit of the people and places that produce them. With insight, curiosity, and charm, he invites us to see wine not just as a drink, but as a lens through which to experience the world. A warm welcome to Brazilian readers joining this inspiring voyage!”

Founded in 1995, and with participation from over 200 countries, the Gourmand Awards are the only international competition dedicated to publications on food and drinks cultures. The competition is free and open to all languages. Each year, Gourmand organizes a global symposium in a location of notable gastronomic relevance, bringing together leading voices from the diplomacy, culinary, publishing, and cultural sectors.

The next world gathering of food culture professionals will take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during the Saudi Feast Food Festival, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Gourmand Awards.

Wine Books: 20 years of Chateau Feely, 30 Years of Gourmand Book Awards

April 1, 2025 By in book reviews, wine, wine awards 3 Comments

Today’s column celebrates two anniversaries: 20 years of Chateau Feely and 30 years of the Gourmand  Awards. What connects these two events? Wine books, of course, and the stories they tell us about wine and about life.

Grape Expectations: 20 Years of Chateau Feely

Caro Feely, Grape Expectations: A Family’s Vineyard Adventure in France. (First book in the Vineyard Series of books about Chateau Feely).

This is the 20th anniversary of Chateau Feely, a small organic and biodynamic winery in South West France. Caro Feely writes that

“We bought our vineyard in South West France in 2005 following our dream to create great wines on fine terroir. Now, with the wisdom of many years of winegrowing we celebrate not a misty dream but years of hard work and the inspiration of working with nature and nurturing this farm back to the full health and flavour of a living biodynamic soil. In our risky endeavour we have felt a lot: sometimes fear, sometimes pain but mostly great joy and fulfillment.”

I haven’t visited Chateau Feely, but like many people, I have shared the Feely family’s journey through Caro’s four Vineyard Series books, starting with Grape Expectations, and progressing through Saving Our Skins, Vineyard Confessions, and Cultivating Change. When Grape Expectations first appeared I wrote that

Caro Feely is an economist and a dreamer and so there was bound to be a bit of cognitive dissonance when she and her husband Sean and their two daughters pulled up stakes in Dublin and moved to Saussignac to grow grapes, make wine, and live the dream instead of just dreaming it.

Cognitive dissonance? Yes, that’s the stress that you feel when you try to believe two contradictory things at the same time and there cannot be two thoughts that are much more in contradiction than the idea of taking over a dilapidated house and run down vineyard and cellar and making great wine and the notion that you will be able to pay the bills and support a family in the process.

I’m not quite sure if Feely’s 2012 book Grape Expectations was written as a creative outlet, a cheap form of therapy or to generate an additional revenue stream, but it is a delightful book that I recommend to all my friends. Feely tells her family’s story and the book could be placed on a shelf along with Under the Tuscan Sun or A Year in Provence because of its ability to give all of us a peek at expat daily life in a suitably romantic setting,

But while there’s enough romance in Feely’s book to make it attractive to someone looking for an escape, it is the reality of her situation that appeals most to me. Besides telling a good story about her family’s experiences, she also teaches us a great deal about the arts and craft of winegrowing and the economics of the wine business, with its peculiar challenges and opportunities.

Grape Expectations is one of my favorite wine books because it weaves all the natural, technical, social, business, and personal elements of wine into a compelling (and true!) story. The four volumes of Feely’s Vineyard Series provide a rare opportunity to experience the hardships and triumphs of winegrowing from the relative comfort of your armchair. Highly recommended.

30 Years of the Gourmand Awards

Edouard Cointreau founded the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in 1995. Over the last 30 years they have expanded in several dimensions snf now seek to honor the best food, wine, and drinks books, printed or digital, as well as food television.

It is truly a global celebration. More than 221 countries have been represented, which is more than the United Nations (193 member states) and the same as FIFA, the world soccer governing body (221 member associations).

Edouard writes, “We reward now all food and drinks content, in print or digital, paid or free, private or public, trade publishers or self published, big or small, with an equal chance for everyone.”

The 30th anniversary celebration takes place from June 18-22, 2025, at the historic Palace of Marques de Pombal in Oeiras, Portugal. It should be quite a party!

Gourmand is inspired by the Olympics. Wine and food books are organized by nation of origin and earn the equivalents of bronze, silver, and gold awards. Edouard reports that “For the past 30 years, we have rewarded the best drinks books. Wine books 59%, spirits 24% beer 6%, coffee 5%, tea 3%, others 3%. English 37%, French 22%, Spanish 12%, others 29%.” There has been a gradual decline in wine books over the years, he notes, as interest in other beverages has increased.

The decrease in wine books is notable in the U.S. and U.K., but interest is stronger in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil. It is an interesting coincidence that an excellent Portuguese translation of one of my books was recently published in Brazil and that my colleagues Cynthia Howson and Pierre Ly recently published a Spanish translation of their book about adventures on the wine trail in China.

Edouard breaks down the awards by the numbers:

  • We have over 220 countries and regions participating every year since 2019.  Founded 30 years ago, in 1995, it took us 12 years to reach 100 participating countries, 20 years to reach 200. Our number of countries and regions is slightly higher than the Olympics, because everyone eats, and not everyone can afford to have a sports team. The maximum number is around 250. There are 193 countries in the United Nations.
  • We now have a balance of origins for participating books between continents. North America plus Western Europe are equal to Asia-Pacific, Africa, Latin America. By languages, participating books are in English 41%, French 12%, Spanish 12%, other languages 36%.
  •  Traditional trade publishers have decreased to 70%, with independently published rising to 20% and corporations a surprising 10%.
  •  Internet now has quality food and drink books available free for downloads. They are screened by the Gourmand Awards for the best since 2016. They have their own separate parallel categories in the Gourmand Awards.
  • Today the top free publications are published 66% by public institutions, 19% by NGOs, and 15% by private interests.
  • United Nations and other big international organizations such as FAO, WFP, UNESCO, EU, CIRAD, OIV, have many food or drink publications, while local, or regional governments issue a large quantity of single titles more difficult to find.
  • For 20 years, women authors of food books have been stable over 60%,with men authors under 40%. It is the opposite for drink books, with men authors slowly decreasing at 75%, women rising at 25%.
  • For drinks books, on our lists, wine books are decreasing, now at 59%. All other drink books are up, with alcohol spirits books at 24%, beer at 6%, coffee at 5%, tea at 3%, others at 3%.
  • Food and drink culture is becoming global. It is not polarized. It is a gigantic puzzle where each piece is important and has its part.

Congratulations to this year’s winners. And thanks to Edouard Cointreau for three decades of hard work promoting wine books and supporting publishers and authors (like me).

Flashback: Confessions of a Rookie Wine Judge

October 11, 2022 By in wine, wine awards, Wine Competitions, wine critics Leave a comment

I’ve been sidelined by a medical issue for the last couple of weeks and, while I am fine now, I won’t be able to taste wine for another week or two. This situation reminded me of the time I tasted literally dozens and dozens of wine every morning as a judge at the International Wine Competition Bucharest i(now rebranded as VINARIUM International Wine Contest) n 2018.

Here’s a flashback column about my “Confessions of a Rookie Wine Judge.” Enjoy!

Confessions of a Rookie Wine Judge

The Wine Economist / November 27, 2018

I have declined several invitations to serve on wine competition juries, but when Catalin Paduraru asked me to be be part of the International Wine Competition Bucharest I just couldn’t say no.

Sue and I had never visited Romania and there was much I wanted to learn about the country and its wines. Besides, Catalin (along with Lucian Marcu) had somehow managed to publish a Romanian version of my book Wine Wars. So we headed to Iași, Romania’s cultural capital, where this year’s competition was held.

Reservations? I had a few because of my lack of formal training in wine tasting and my rookie juror status, so I asked a few experienced friends for advice. It’s not so hard, one veteran juror told me. You know how to taste wine, just concentrate and focus. Taste them one at a time. A Master of Wine advised me to be generous in general, except when there were clear faults, and then to cut no slack.

Wine by the Numbers1mbc2

The wine competition was organized according to OIV regulations. We were grouped into three teams or “commissions” of five jurors each, three internationals and two from the home country Romania. We used the “Australian” system, I was told, where we could talk a bit amongst ourselves rather than sitting solo. As in the old days of figure skating scoring, the highest and lowest scores are thrown out for each wine and the three middle ones averaged.

The wines were evaluated on a 100-point scale divided into a number of different categories. The tablet-based OIV software made it easy to focus on thinking about the wine and my friend was right — if you think about one wine and one sensory element at a time the task is difficult, but not overwhelming.

The software gave each juror a report of his or her score for a wine along with the average score. Wines that received an average between 82 and 84.99 points earned a silver medal. 85 to 91.99 point wines were gold. 92 points and over received the Great Gold Medal. This is a pretty tough grading curve, but with many elements evaluated critically and individually, maximum scores are hard to achieve.

My team tasted 50 to 60 wines over the course of about 3 hours each morning for  three days in a row.  Lunch followed the judging and the wines were revealed, giving us an opportunity to see what labels were inside the closed bags.

60 wines in three hours does not leave much time for chit-chat and if you watch the video about the event you will notice how serious we all were. Staying focused for so long and moving through the wines so quickly was a challenge.

Rookie Mistakes

There were several aspects of the competition that took some time for this rookie to figure out. The wines were assembled by category not region (or country of origin) or grape variety. So a flight of dry white wines might include several different grape varieties and countries or regions of origin. It was therefore important to approach each wine with an open mind because the variation from glass to glass was sometimes dramatic.

Because the software reported both my score for each wine and also the team average, I was initially tempted to see the average as the “right answer” and try to think about what I must have missed if I was far off the mark.  There was a certain satisfaction when we all gave a wine exactly the same total score, but I’ll bet we differed in the details.

Eventually I realized that this second-guessing was another rookie mistake since there really isn’t a right answer.  Or, rather, it wasn’t my job to try to guess what the other jurors thought, but to provide my own careful judgement. The economists’ motto is degustibus non est disputandum!iwcb1

Mining Gold and Silver

Sue had the best view of the process. She and an official OIV observer sat apart from the rest of us. They got to taste the wines along with one of the commissions (not mine) and they could see all of the scores come in and follow the dynamics of the tasting. It was interesting, she told me when it was all over, to see how different jurors reacted to particular wines and how the individual scores were forged into gold and silver medals.

My fellow wine economists often criticize wine competitions in general because they make seemingly objective awards on the basis of necessarily subjective and sometimes inconsistent sensory evaluation.  The jurors I spoke with were aware of this problem and familiar with the research on the issue, but committed to the project nonetheless, which might account for the serious concentration and focused work ethic they all displayed. I was impressed.

Would I agree to serve on a jury again? It would depend on the circumstances. But I have already started to think about what I would do differently — how I would organize my scoring so that the final number better reflects what I sense in the glass.

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Sue and I would like to thank all the wonderful people we met in Iasi. Special thanks to Catalin and Lucian, of course, and to my fellow jurors Diana Lazar, Richard Pfister, Roberto Gaudio, and Carole Cliche. Thanks as well to Prof. Valeriu Cotea, who gently coached me through my rookie experience and to Cristian Ionescu, who kept the technology working efficiently and made life easy for all of us.

Sue took these photos at one of the post-jury luncheons, where the wines were revealed and we could finally see the labels behind our scores.

Lessons from Catena & the Argentina Wine Miracle

February 15, 2022 By in Argentina, economic crisis, wine, wine awards, wine history, wine markets 4 Comments

The press release begins this way:

MENDOZA, Argentina – February 8, 2022 – Dr. Nicolás Catena Zapata of Catena Zapata winery received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 22nd Annual Wine Enthusiast Wine Star Awards held last night at the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami. This prestigious industry event recognizes individuals and companies for their exceptional contributions to the success of the wine and beverage alcohol industry.

Dr. Catena’s life in wine is indeed worth celebrating. He was a leading protagonist in what I call the Argentina wine miracle. An economist by training, Dr. Catena was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in the early 1980s when he was inspired by what he saw happening in California. These were the exciting days that followed the 1976 Judgement of Paris, so there was energy and confidence in the air.

California Lessons in Argentina

Catena took this vision back to Argentina, where he exchanged academic tweeds for vineyard and winery clothes. The family firm, Bodega Catena Zapata, and Argentina’s wine industry in general, faced a dire crisis.

Sue and I visited the Catena Zapa “Pyramid” winery a few years ago and, because I am an economist like Dr. Catena, we were ushered into his personal library. I recognized many of the books because they were the same ones that I was studying in the 1970s and 1980s, when stagflation was a global problem, and the debt crisis was on everyone’s minds.

These were more than academic issues for the wine business in Argentina at the time. Having evolved in the “old world” style to make inexpensive commodity wine for the domestic market, Argentina wineries were caught in a squeeze when inflation pumped up costs at the same time that domestic recession caused demand to slump. Could the surplus wine be diverted to export? Not likely, because the quality of much of the wine was below international standards. Argentina’s economic crisis was a wine crisis, too.

That Argentina wine found the energy and confidence to turn the corner, to make wines of constantly rising quality in the face of daunting headwinds, is noteworthy indeed and Dr. Catena more than deserves his lifetime achievement award for his role in making Argentina a world-class wine producing nation. A miracle? I don’t think it is wrong to apply this term to Argentina’s dramatic transformation.

I think it is important to keep these past achievements in our minds today because the challenges that wine faces, while different from the past, are not so different that important lessons cannot be gleaned. History may not repeat itself but sometimes, as Mark Twain observed, it rhymes.

Dividends from the Argentina Wine Miracle

Argentina is experiencing economic crisis again today, overwhelmed by external debt and internal inflation. Perhaps the single best indicator of the depth of the crisis is this graph of the Argentina peso against the US dollar for the decade 2011 to 2021. Fewer than 5 pesos were needed to purchase a dollar in 2011. The rate was about 15 pesos per dollar when we visited five years later in 2016 — that’s a very substantial decrease in the currency’s value in such a short period of time.

But the exchange rate today is much worse — it takes more than 100 pesos to buy a dollar now. And that’s the official exchange rate. I’m guessing that the peso is much cheaper on the unofficial market. This is what an (official) inflation rate of over 50% a year (even higher than inflation in Turkey!) will do.

Although Argentina’s economy is bouncing back from its covid-induced decline, domestic economic conditions are very challenging — not as bad as in the 1980s perhaps, but difficult indeed.  The uncertainty about what policies will be result from continuing debt negotiations with the IMF cloud the horizon. Argentina wine is not immune to these problems, but it is much better positioned today to ride out the storm. Exports were up in 2021. The miracle continues to pay dividends.

Lessons for the U.S. and Beyond

But the lessons don’t end there. I think it is important for wine business leaders in the United States and elsewhere to study Argentina’s wine history and remember that sometimes it is necessary to radically re-think arrangements to adapt to changing circumstances. “They say that time changes things,” according to one of my favorite maxims, “but sometimes you have to change them yourself.”

In the US, for example, inflation has returned as an economic concern and, for the wine industry, the fact of stagnant demand cannot be ignored. There is no debt crisis at present, but with gross debt levels at record highs and rising interest rates on the horizon, it is foolish to think that cracks in debt markets will not eventually appear. Small increases in interest rates can translate into trillions of dollars of additional interest obligation very quickly with so much public and private debt in play at high levels of risk.

Foreign debt is especially vulnerable because so much of it is denominated in dollars and the dollar is likely to appreciate as U.S. interest rates rise. That’s double jeopardy.

For the wine industry, stagnant demand is a problem that is on the minds of many, just as it was in Argentina four decades ago. The Argentina miracle was to shift from low- to high-quality to escape a race-to-the-bottom scenario. For the U.S., the challenge may well be to produce good quality but more affordable wines to appeal to potential consumers who are put off by wine’s relatively high price compared with other beverages.

I note without comment that Wall Street Journal wine columnist Lettie Teague’s recent column on good $10 wines did not include any U.S. product recommendation. “Sadly,” Teague writes, “I couldn’t find any wines made in the U.S. that fit all my criteria.” That’s pretty much the flip side of Argentina back in the day.

I believe in miracles and in wine’s ability to transform itself without losing its soul. And so I offer a toast to Dr. Nicolás Catena Zapata, the economics professor who became a transformational winemaker and whose miracle offers lessons that are relevant today.

“Around the World in 80 Wines” on List of 56 All-Time Best Wine Books

October 31, 2019 By in Shameless Self-Promotion, wine awards 10 Comments

9781442257368BookAuthority.org has included my book Around the World in Eighty Wines on its list of the 56 “Best Wine Books of All Time.” You can find it at #22, behind Wine Folly and Wine Bible (#1 and #2) along with wine books by some pretty talented wine writers. I’m flattered (and a bit surprised, to be honest) to be included on the list.

Here’s how this “Best Wine Book” list was made. BookAuthority uses an algorithm to rate the popularity and influence of hundreds of thousands of books in many categories. According to the website:

Every day, our site scans the web for notable books on various topics.

It then collects dozens of different signals about each book (such as public mentions, recommendations, ratings, sentiment and sales history) and uses a proprietary algorithm to rate each book. Only the very best books are featured in BookAuthority’s lists.

To keep our site objective and unbiased, ratings are calculated based purely on data. We do not accept authors’ requests to feature a book, nor do we charge any money to be featured.

There are thousands of wine books available according to Amazon.com, so I guess it is unusual to get the sort of attention that the algorithm looks for. I’m just happy that people read my books and find them useful. Awards are the icing on the cake.

I would like to thank BookAuthority (especially whoever wrote their algorithm) and all the people who made 80 Wines a success. Look for a paperback edition of 80 Wines in a few months and maybe another translated edition, too. Cheers!

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(Basketball fans might remember that 22 was Elgin Baylor‘s number — a good omen!)

Războaiele Vinului Short-Listed for International Wine Book Award

May 7, 2019 By in Shameless Self-Promotion, wine, wine awards 5 Comments

newwinewarsRăzboaiele Vinului, the Romanian version of my 2011 book Wine Wars, has been short-listed for the 2019 Gourmand International award for best wine book translation. Here are the books up for this prestigious award.

Austria: Georgischer Wein, Anna Saldadze, Claudia Tancsits (Leopold Stocker)
China: Dictionary for wine lovers, Bernard Pivot (East China Normal University) 9787567575172
France: L’anglais commercial du vin, Laetitia Perraut (Cafe Anglais)
Italy: Viaggio in Anfora, Kato Keiko. Masuko Maika, P. Bellomo (Velier)
Macedonia: Xinómavro, Stravroula Kourakou, Translation Alexandra Doumas (Foinikas)
Netherlands: Beer, Tadeáš Hájek, Translation Lander Meeusen (Createspace)
Portugal: Glossário Ilustrado do Vinho, Jorge Böhm (Dinalivro)
Romania: Războaiele vinului, Mike Veseth (Aser – Vinul.ro)
Russia: Madeira o vinho dos czares, Siiri & José Milhazes
Sweden: Cava, Spain’s Premium Sparkling Wine, Anna Wallner (Grenadine)

The bronze, silver, and gold medalist in this category, along with other winners, will be announced on July 4 at the gala Gourmand Awards ceremony in Macao.

Congratulations to the Romanian team who made this volume possible including especially Cătălin Păduraru, Lucian Marcu, and Radu Rizea. Here is a photo of Cătălin, me, and the world’s largest copy of Războaiele vinului taken in Iasi last fall.

And thanks to Gourmand International for this recognition of my Romanian friends’ efforts. I am grateful to Gourmand International for previious awards including Best Wine Blog (for The Wine Economist in 2015) and Best Wine Writing (for Money, Taste, and Wine in 2016).

wwro

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The Wine Economist will take a break next week. Sue and I will be in Sardinia where I am speaking at the Porto Cervo Wine & Food Festival.

Confessions of a Rookie Wine Judge

November 27, 2018 By in wine, wine awards, Wine Competitions, wine critics, wine ratings 2 Comments

I have declined several invitations to serve on wine competition juries, but when Catalin Paduraru asked me to be be part of the International Wine Competition Bucharest I just couldn’t say no.

Sue and I had never visited Romania and there was much I wanted to learn about the country and its wines. Besides, Catalin (along with Lucian Marcu) had somehow managed to publish a Romanian version of my book Wine Wars. So we headed to Iași, Romania’s cultural capital, where this year’s competition was held.

Reservations? I had a few because of my lack of formal training in wine tasting and my rookie juror status, so I asked a few experienced friends for advice. It’s not so hard, one veteran juror told me. You know how to taste wine, just concentrate and focus. Taste them one at a time. A Master of Wine advised me to be generous in general, except when there were clear faults, and then to cut no slack.

Wine by the Numbers1mbc2

The wine competition was organized according to OIV regulations. We were grouped into three teams or “commissions” of five jurors each, three internationals and two from the home country Romania. We used the “Australian” system, I was told, where we could talk a bit amongst ourselves rather than sitting solo. As in the old days of figure skating scoring, the highest and lowest scores are thrown out for each wine and the three middle ones averaged.

The wines were evaluated on a 100-point scale divided into a number of different categories. The tablet-based OIV software made it easy to focus on thinking about the wine and my friend was right — if you think about one wine and one sensory element at a time the task is difficult, but not overwhelming.

The software gave each juror a report of his or her score for a wine along with the average score. Wines that received an average between 82 and 84.99 points earned a silver medal. 85 to 91.99 point wines were gold. 92 points and over received the Great Gold Medal. This is a pretty tough grading curve, but with many elements evaluated critically and individually, maximum scores are hard to achieve.

My team tasted 50 to 60 wines over the course of about 3 hours each morning for  three days in a row.  Lunch followed the judging and the wines were revealed, giving us an opportunity to see what labels were inside the closed bags.

60 wines in three hours does not leave much time for chit-chat and if you watch the video above you will notice how serious we all were. Staying focused for so long and moving through the wines so quickly was a challenge.

Rookie Mistakes

There were several aspects of the competition that took some time for this rookie to figure out. The wines were assembled by category not region (or country of origin) or grape variety. So a flight of dry white wines might include several different grape varieties and countries or regions of origin. It was therefore important to approach each wine with an open mind because the variation from glass to glass was sometimes dramatic.

Because the software reported both my score for each wine and also the team average, I was initially tempted to see the average as the “right answer” and try to think about what I must have missed if I was far off the mark.  There was a certain satisfaction when we all gave a wine exactly the same total score, but I’ll bet we differed in the details.

Eventually I realized that this second-guessing was another rookie mistake since there really isn’t a right answer.  Or, rather, it wasn’t my job to try to guess what the other jurors thought, but to provide my own careful judgement. The economists’ motto is degustibus non est disputandum!iwcb1

Mining Gold and Silver

Sue had the best view of the process. She and an official OIV observer sat apart from the rest of us. They got to taste the wines along with one of the commissions (not mine) and they could see all of the scores come in and follow the dynamics of the tasting. It was interesting, she told me when it was all over, to see how different jurors reacted to particular wines and how the individual scores were forged into gold and silver medals.

My fellow wine economists often criticize wine competitions in general because they make seemingly objective awards on the basis of necessarily subjective and sometimes inconsistent sensory evaluation.  The jurors I spoke with were aware of this problem and familiar with the research on the issue, but committed to the project nonetheless, which might account for the serious concentration and focused work ethic they all displayed. I was impressed.

Would I agree to serve on a jury again? It would depend on the circumstances. But I have already started to think about what I would do differently — how I would organize my scoring so that the final number better reflects what I sense in the glass.

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Sue and I would like to thank all the wonderful people we met in Iasi. Special thanks to Catalin and Lucian, of course, and to my fellow jurors Diana Lazar, Richard Pfister, Roberto Gaudio, and Carole Cliche. Thanks as well to Prof. Valeriu Cotea, who gently coached me through my rookie experience and to Cristian Ionescu, who kept the technology working efficiently and made life easy for all of us.

Sue took these photos at one of the post-jury luncheons, where the wines were revealed and we could finally see the labels behind our scores.

The Future of Italian Wine is in Good Hands

October 16, 2018 By in Italian wine, wine, wine awards, wine education, wine research, wine science 1 Comment

awardDeborah Gelisi wiped the tears from her face, took a deep breath, and continued with her presentation on the importance of sustainability for Italian wine producers. It wasn’t an easy thing to do.

Deborah’s audience was in tears, too. Her classmates and teachers at the Scuola Enologica di Conegliano.  Her winegrower parents.  Even her 12-year old brother, the fearless goalkeeper of his youth soccer team. Over at the head table the city’s  mayor was misty, the school’s director was teary, Rai Uno journalist Camilla Nata was a little choked up, and I was a pretty emotional myself. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Stories about rooms full tearful people don’t usually feature on The Wine Economist, so you probably have some questions about what was going on and how this relates to this column’s optimistic title. I’ll try to answer the questions one by one.

Who is Deborah Gelisi?

Deborah Gelisi is an 18 year old student at the Conegliano Wine School, which is Italy’s oldest enology and viticulture school and, according to our friend Paul Wagner, probably the largest wine school in the world. Founded by Antonio Carpenè in 1876, it provides education and training for young students who have chosen to work in the wine industry. The school has a long list of distinguished alumni including notable Romeo Bragato, who was instrumental in the development of wine industries in Australia and New Zealand in the 19th Century.

Deborah comes from a wine-growing family. She gets up early each day to work at Podere Gelisi Antonio, then takes the train from Pordenone to Conegliano for classes, reversing the commute in the afternoon for more work and, of course, study. I don’t know when she sleeps.

Why Was Everyone Crying? Bad news?

Deborah was being honored as the first recipient of the “Etilia Carpenè Larivera International Scholarship,“ which will provide her  with the opportunity to expand and deepen her wine knowledge through international travel  and study and jump-start her career in wine.efx-s

The scholarship was inaugurated this year to mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of Carpenè Malvolti, one of Italy’s most distinguished wine producers. Its founder, Antonio Carpenè was the inventor of the process of secondary fermentation in autoclaves that gives us Prosecco.

Carpenè Malvolti honors its past in many ways, which you will discover if you spend some time at the new visitor center in Conegliano, but as a family wine business it is all about building for future generations. That’s why the photo above shows Deborah with Rosann Carpenè Larivera, the fifth generation of the famous family, along with her daughter Etilla, the rising sixth generation, for whom the scholarship is named.

What’s the Significance of the Award?

It is good to honor students and to provide valuable educational opportunities, of course, but it is important to see this award in broader context. Deborah’s award was part of a project called Generazione DOCG, which aims to invest in the future of the region through its  young people. Everyone was crying (and then celebrating) because this isn’t an ending but a beginning, both for Deborah and for the region.

The next generation of Italian wine producers will face many challenges, as we discussed at the VinoVIP meetings in Forte dei Marmi in June. The industry is fragmented, lacking the strong brands that could build help open markets and build margins. It won’t be easy to make progress given intense competition everywhere.

But there is real hope. Rising wine professionals like Deborah Gelisi and her student colleagues can make a difference in the vineyards, cellars, and markets. If Deborah is an indication, they have the knowledge, drive, determination, and entrepreneurial spirit that will be  needed.

And they have the backing of their families, communities, and forward-looking wine firms such as Carpenè Malvolti. With this team supporting and encouraging them, it is easy to see that the future of Italian wine is in good hands.

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Congratulations to Deborah Gelisi. Special thanks to Carpenè Malvolti for inviting me to speak at this awards ceremony. It was an honor and a pleasure.

 

Around the World in Eighty Wines Wins Gourmand International Wine Book Prize

January 23, 2018 By in book reviews, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine, wine awards, Wine Competitions, wine tourism 9 Comments

9781442257368My new book Around the World in Eighty Wines has received the Gourmand International 2018 award for best U.S. book in the wine and spirits tourism category and will now compete for “Best in the World” with winners from other countries. The global gold, silver, and bronze medals will be announced this May at award ceremonies in Yantai, China.

The Gourmand International awards are important and I have been fortunate to be recognized in the past for best U.S. and bronze medal “world’s best” wine history book (Wine Wars, 2012), world’s best wine blog (WineEconomist.com, 2015) and world’s best wine writing (for Money, Taste, and Wine: It’s Complicated, 2016).

Here is the list of international champions in the wine and spirits tourism category:

logo_awardsAustria – Kulinarische Tourismus und Weintourismus (Springer)
Canada – Les Paradis de la Biere Blanche (Druide)
China – Compass to the ocean of wine (Zhejiang S/T) 9787534179549
France – Des Vignes et des Hommes (Feret)
Georgia – Georgia, Miquel Hudin (Vinologue)
Germany – Seewein, Wein Kultur am Bodensee (Jan Thorbeke)
Portugal – Vinhos & Petiscos (Caminho das Palavras)
Scotland – I love champagne, David Zyw (Freight Books)
Singapore – Cracking Croatian Wine, Charine Tan, Dr Matthew Horkey
Switzerland – Randos bieres en Suisse Romande, Monika Saxer (Helvetiq)
USA – Around the world in 80 wines, Mike Veseth (Rowman & Littlefield)

croatianI am especially pleased to see that Cracking Croatian Wine by Charine Tan and Dr. Matthew Horkey is also on the list. Sue and I met Charine and Matt at the 2016 UNWTO global wine tourism conference in Tbilisi, Georgia and we like and admire them a lot. Their books are valuable additions to the resources available to wine tourists in particular and wine enthusiasts generally.

I don’t know who will be named the “best in the world,”, but I appreciate this recognition. Good luck to Charine, Matt, and all the other national champions in all the categories.