IWSC 2023 Spirits Awards: Armagnac & other grape brandies
The grape spirits category is always a popular one for our spirits awards and the judging was led this year by our Spirits Judging Committee member, Joel Harrison.
As a member of the Compagnie des Mousquetaires d’Armagnac, he was responsible for overseeing the panels tasting the Armagnac entries and this year, four Gold Outstanding medals were awarded to this category:
Other entries in the Armagnac category were awarded 7 Gold, 15 Silver and 8 Bronze medals.
On the same day as the Armagnac judging, Joel and his panels oversaw the judging of the other grape brandy entries (with the exception of Cognac*).
During judging, Joel commented on the diversity of grape spirits on offer, and he was correct to highlight this. For our 2023 awards we had entries from 22 countries, including Georgia, Taiwan, Romania, Portugal, South Africa, Slovakia, Canada and even England. “As we've seen with the growth of wine and the expansion from the traditional wine making regions, we're seeing the same with the distilling of those wines into new spirits brands. This has been really interesting to observe.”
5 entries from the Grape Brandy category were awarded Gold Outstanding medals:
12 Gold medals, 64 Silvers and 50 Bronze medals were also awarded.
*Cognac results will be announced on 12 April.
Discover all our 2023 spirits results on the IWSC website.
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