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What is your wine fantasy? Mine, is spending five days in a banquet hall ballroom amid 1800+ different Canadian wines, and having a chance to patrol the seven rows of tables with my glass, spittoon and laptop at hand. To look for what’s new, to reacquaint with and contextualize favourites, to do themed tastings by variety, style and appellation. But this is not just a fantasy. I get to do it every year as Co-Chief Judge of the National Wine Awards of Canada.
Not all my time is spent living out the fantasy. I run quality control on the judging process. Mostly that means re-pouring wines that the 21 judges might suspect have an issue – and they are instructed to always question and give a wine a second chance. It also means spending time with judging panels that might be indecisive on a given wine, and bringing them together. Professional judges need to find consensus. You can’t just throw individual scores against the wall and average them. Everything would be buried in the mushy middle. As in a judicial proceeding they must argue their case.
But there are periods during the five days when I do get to spend hours here and there dabbling, and tasting, and stringing together ideas. And I feel very privileged. Almost no one has such a compressed and detailed opportunity to do this. My ultimate fantasy would be to spend a month, not just five days.
The complete results of the 26th WineAlign National Wine Awards of Canada are now published at winealign.com. There are detailed articles on the Winery of the Year (Tawse Estate Winery of Niagara), the Best Performing Small Winery (Black Bank Hill of Niagara), the top 25 ranked wineries in Canada, The Top Ten Wineries in B.C and Ontario, and the Platinum Award Winners. You can then go deeper into comprehensive category by category listings of medal winners, with excellent review and analysis of the results by our senior judges.
One of my most important unofficial duties in the back room of the Nationals is to look for what’s new on the Canadian wine landscape, and spot trends. This Post is an attempt to distill and reflect upon some of my most interesting ‘first and finds’ during this process. Not every wine reviewed was encountered at the Nationals, but most were. They are all firsts in some way, even if just to me. And some are curiosities. All are high quality wines