2022 Wine Judging - deliberations from our judges #8

This year was a first for the IWSC specially selected sparkling wine experts selected for two days of judging worldwide sparkling wines. We caught up with our newest Wine Judging Committee member and Master of Wine, Essi Avellan: 

 
“So today we had a big day of tasting sparkling wine. This is the first time we've had these these sparkling exclusive panels. We tasted wines from across North and South America - USA, Canada, Brazil. Unsurprisingly we also had lots of entrants from Spain, Italy and of course, France, especially Champagne. We’ll taste other categories tomorrow, including English sparkling, but for today, Champagne was definitely the star of the show. 

“From Champagne the Blanc de Blanc and Blanc de Noir: I was personally very happy with the with the quality of the Blanc de Noir which is a rather challenging style. And the rosés seemed to do very well today as well.

“Moving across the Atlantic we had quite a few sparkling wines from from Canada and some actually showed great potential. While we didn’t award any golds we had some nice silver's - we definitely see the quality going up from Canada and with its climactic potential it really was one of the most interesting emerging regions for sparkling wine we tasted today.”

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