All gold and silver medal winners are available now to view on www.wine-pages.com and will also be listed on www.champagnesparklingwwc.com from August 2.
More than 650 entries from 16 countries were received in the first year of judging, with 185 wines winning silver medals and above. The overall World Champion and Best in Class trophies will be announced in September.
Competition founder and leading authority on sparkling wines, Tom Stevenson, was joined in May this year by Finland’s editor of Fine Champagne magazine, Essi Avellan MW, and Australian sparkling wine consultant, Dr Tony Jordan, for the judging process.
These three tasted all entries blind, including the finest and rarest prestige cuvées of champagne. Some of which are so iconic that they have never entered any wine competition before, claim to the organisers.
The highest number of gold medals were captured by champagne with 35. Next came English sparkling wines, getting 11 gold and 14 silver medals. Australia got 10 gold and 7 silver medals while Franciacorta got 5 Gold and 11 silver.
Prosecco and Cava also proved that they can produce excellent quality wines as well as offering value for money, with 10 gold and 14 silvers.
Stevenson said: “We tasted blind in flights by region, style and vintage, scoring in solitude before discussing each wine and deciding which would progress to the medal stage. All three of the judges were required to taste every single wine in the competition and we all had to agree on a medal before it could be awarded, which might sound like the obvious way to proceed, but it is in fact a uniquely fair and consistent judging process for a global wine competition.”
“I set up the Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships because these wines are more popular now than they have ever been, but it is a very specialised category of wine that should be judged by experienced tasters, if the results are to be meaningful, and Essi and Tony are the best I know,” he said.
“We are all independently minded. We all came away from this competition with a handful of other wines we would personally give gold medals to, but I wanted the World Championships to provide consumers with a truly authorative guide to the very best champagnes and sparkling wines in the world and the only way to achieve that is to have the same three specialists taste every single wine and agree all the medals. We then consigned those we judged to be bronze and commended to the dustbin of shame along with the ‘No Awards’ that other competitions place there,” said Stevenson.
