Wine competitions

THE WINE CLUB

It's an axiom that every wine producer thinks that his (or her) wine is the best wine going, and gets terribly upset when writers and commentators give indifferent reviews about their brands.

There's no doubt that wine is a very subjective thing: you might like your wines strong and oaky while the next person may prefer his drop to be subtler "" that's really the old Bordeaux vs Burgundy or Robert Parker vs The Rest argument in a nutshell! Which is not to say that one perspective is better or worse than the other.

But no one person can possibly taste all the wines there are "" and with so many new wines arriving every year in the market, it's essential that consumers and customers have some way of getting an objective opinion. After all, wines are expensive and people want to know whether their hard-earned rupees are going to be well-spent.

Enter the Wine Competition. The first and most well-known effort to categorise wines according to quality was surely the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines by Emperor Napoleon III, when leading negociants (brokers) ranked wines according to reputation and price.

With minor changes (Chateau Mouton-Rothschild was elevated to Premier Cru status in 1973), this system continues virtually unchanged and any proposed changes are fought most determinedly!

However, wine competitions originated in the early 1970s when producers from California had what they believed were wines that equalled the great wines of France in quality, but were fetching far lower prices, and so started tasting wines "blind" so as to eliminate the inherent bias of knowing what wine was being tasted.

The Judgment of Paris (1976) organised by Steven Spurrier was possibly the most notable of these early efforts, and led to a revolution in the way wines from the "New World" were perceived (and priced).

In India, a modest start was made in 2007 with the India Wine Challenge organised by Robert Joseph. The 900-odd wines (Indian and imported) entered were tasted both in London and New Delhi, the results were announced at the IFE 2007 fair at Pragati Maidan in end-October, and the medal winners: (importers Fine Wines & More and Wine Park, and Indian wines like Nine Hills and Sula) derived excellent mileage from the same.

Of course, the largest wine competition in the world is the International Wine Challenge, organised out of London and started in 1984 by Robert Joseph (the same) which had over 9,000 entries in 2007, and it's no surprise that over 40 Indian wines have been entered (for the first time) for 2008 "" the results would be announced in May.

Useful internet sites with ratings include www.winespectator.com and www.wine-searcher.com.

I'm frequently asked "How do Indian wines compare to imported wines?" If the India Wine Challenge was any indication, the answer has to be "While they are getting better, they have a long way to go" "" there was only one (hotly-contested) Indian silver medal winner, and the best wines were simply sublime!

We'll drink to that "" as I say, "Drink more wine, be happier and healthier".

(al.chandra@gmail.com)