Skills focus

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Welcoming all the judges to the Decanter World Wine Awards being held in London this week Steven Spurrier noted that if a bomb were dropped on Parson’s Green, the wine world would be deprived of some of its best tasters!

And if that misguided bomber were to simultaneously drop a warhead on the Barbican Centre it would wipe out some of the remaining stars who are sipping and spitting their way through the thousands of entries at the London International Wine Challenge (IWC).

Last week I spent four days doing duty at the IWC. This week I’m serving on the South African panel at Decanter. Both competitions are markedly different in their methodology but it’s still fascinating seeing peoples’ reactions to South Africa and its wines.

While I didn’t taste any at the IWC (instead, I had heaps of Spanish Tempranillo, utterly forgettable Czech Pinot Blanc and some rather strange Rosé that was simply described as being from ‘Eastern Europe’) the judges who tasted flights of SA wines were generally complimentary about the overall quality.

There’s a consensus of opinion that South African wines offer far more variety, quality and general excitement than South America and even Australia. One supermarket buyer (who shall remain unidentified to protect himself from reprisals of any sort!) said that South Africa probably deserves twice the amount of shelf space it currently enjoys in the important UK market. Also interesting that the same buyer said the South African category was on the up in terms of both volume and value.