2022 Wine Judging - deliberations from our judges #7

Kicking off the second week of judging we caught up with Ali Cooper MW to hear how the Italian wines judged at todays tastings faired. 

“We had four Italian panels today and on the whole it was a happy days judging for our experts though perhaps one of the panels may have had a slightly less exciting day. 

“A day for lots of good wines though not a huge amount of outstanding, but also very little poor wine. So, again, as I like to say, a solid performance. 

“More specifically Amarone was an interesting category, as a style it's, it's quite hard to judge because it’s so varied. But within that stylistic variation, we found some really interesting wines. I know we’ve awarded a few golds in that category.  We also tasted some good Brunello we also had some great Montepulciano, which you'd hope would be good and they were. 

“We’ve also tasted through wines from southern Italy today: Sicily, Puglia. And again, it's a word I often use, solid - a solid performance, probably what would be expected from these wines. Very few lows. All in all, for a consumer looking at Southern Italy, it's a safe bet. The wines are increasingly well made and to say previously you may not have expected much when looking at wines made from Primitivo and Nero D’Avola, I thought today’s performance was really rather good.”

The IWSC’s 2022 Wine Results will be available from 23 May 2022. Discover other deliberations from this series on our News page here.