Another wine award

A few days ago we received an email inviting us to enter our wines at the Woman & Home Wine Awards 2022, it is a new wine competition. I had, until then, never heard of them, so after typing the name on Google, I discovered it is a magazine about women and home that had decided to generate extra revenue by launching a wine award. For the magazine, a wine competition is the next step from the wine column. I am not too sure we need another wine award, we already have too many, to the point that almost every wine available in the UK has a medal attached to it and consumer don’t go beyond the colour: gold, silver or bronze.

I guess, from the magazine point of view, it is an income, with all other revenues going down, it may provide some relief. This would be the award first year, I would be surprised if they get enough interest, or maybe they will, they may get all big supermarkets entering their wines at £99 each per category hoping to stick a medal to their wines, but we won’t.

In the last few years, we have seen several new wine awards and competitions being launched, wine has become a mainstream drink and plenty of non wine businesses have tried to capitalise on it. Wine drinkers are now found everywhere even amongst the Woman and Home magazine readership, they are not anymore only the ones reading wine magazines such as Decanter.

I have never been a big fan of wine competitions, and as a company we do not enter any, it would be financially not viable for us and our small producers. Some of our wineries do enter the traditionally and most important ones bringing home medals and awards but they do it because some international market requires the wine to be an award winner for it to be imported.

Awards come and go, one year the wine is a gold medal winner the next not even bronze, every vintage is different, every judge has a different palate and nose. I recently saw an advert for a wine with a big gold medal and when reading it, I read “2016”, an award won for the 2016 vintage is being used to promote a 2021 vintage and has been for every vintage in between. If we don’t judge a book by its cover, we should not judge a wine by its award.

Our wines are all winners of the Italyabroad.com award, not only they taste great, but are made by small, independent, family run wineries that respect the environment and we are tough judges, we only import the best.