Now available to download, World’s Most Admired Wine Brands is a comprehensive industry poll of the world's best regarded wine.
The survey has become a reliable barometer of the way the industry regards its leading players. As any wine professional knows, sales success is not the only indicator of a healthy brand.
And achieving mega volumes does not necessarily mean that a wine can be regarded as great. Winning the admiration of your peers, and wine professionals across the world, is not something that can be achieved merely by installing 1-million litre tanks at your winery, shifting 10 million cases a year, or buying the sponsorship of a major sporting event.
So how can it be done? In many ways, it’s an intangible thing. We can’t always put our finger on exactly why we admire something. But we gave our judging panel a few pointers.
When casting their votes, we asked judges to use the following criteria: wines should be of consistent or improving quality, they should reflect their region or country of origin, they should respond to the needs and tastes of their target audience, they should be well marketed and packaged, they should have strong appeal to a wide demographic.
The judging panel, as usual, included Masters of Wine, consultants, winemakers, wine writers, retailers, educators, buyers and analysts.
This year we recruited extra judges from emerging markets in Asia, to give the panel more of a balanced look, and to reflect the explosive growth that wine is experiencing in the region. In particular we’ve approached wine educators – the people who are doing more than most to spread wine knowledge in markets such as China – to take part in the poll.
Judges can vote for up to six wine brands. Again we emphasised that this was not necessarily a competition to reward the best-selling wines in the market, or those with the most critical acclaim. To help them on their way, we supplied a list of more than 80 well-known brands and producers, but as usual we also encouraged the option of free choices – names not included on our list.
The results are fascinating. While some brands have been a model of consistency, and have performed equally well in all three Most Admired surveys, a few tend to yo-yo around the top 50 and some dip in and out. Where there was a tie for places, a small jury of voters was assembled to decide the final positions.
