2022 Wine Judging - deliberations from our judges #11

Wrapping up our sparkling wine tastings for the week, we hear again from Essi Avellan MW who was overseeing the panels for this category.

“We tasted a lot of English sparkling wine today and once again we tasted lots and lots of champagne, mostly vintage champagne. I’m happy to say we had some nice, shiny gold medals today.

“The vintages we tasted today were 2016 and older, some all the way down to the 2008 and 2007 vintage. This meant a lot of different characteristics across the vintages.

“As Canada was the country that performed the strongest yesterday alongside the obvious standout performance from Champagne, today England was the country that accompanied Champagne with a solid medal performance, though to be honest I was expecting more. Lots of silvers here though only a tight selection of golds, but there is great potential in English sparkling wine. Today overall, we saw a bit of a mixed bag and quite big vintage variations.

“Beyond England and France, we had sparkling wines from a multitude of other countries so a fascinating day tasting. We tasted sparkling wines from Moldova, Hungary, Japan and even Myanmar. So, a mixed class of styles and origins, but all very interesting. While there no real stand out sparkling wines yet from these emerging countries, the potential is certainly developing, and we had some silvers and bronze medals awarded amongst the tasting flights.

Finally, Essi, we know this is your last day judging with the us, and this is the first year we’ve had sparkling expert panels exclusively tasting sparkling wine, tell us in your opinion why you think sparkling wine producers should consider entering the IWSC for next year?

“I think that it really helps that we have sparkling wine panels, people who are more focused and experienced in tasting sparkling wine because as we’re aware, it's a very different style of wine and we're looking really for the finesse in the wine. So, the more you have specialist panels with real experts tasting properly organised flights like you have here at the IWSC, the more consistent the results are and that's why I encourage people to enter.”