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August 2019 Wine of the Month Review - Six Nations Wine Challenge
Well August has come and gone!
The big event for us this month (Echanson and Gastronomique) was helping out with the Six Nations Wine Challenge. Not as judges, Ross Anderson had five internationally qualified men to do that. John and I assisted four young sommeliers as stewards for a couple of days of the judging, which went over five days.
The Challenge involves initially the invitation by a judge to producers in his country to submit wines to the Challenge. All the wine which arrive are then allocated to a class and tasted blind, one class at a time, by all the judges, marked, results collated and trophy’s, gold medals etc. awarded.
We were kept busy opening bottles – quite a reasonable proportion had corks - setting out glasses, then filling them and after the judges had finished removing them. Then repeat! Fifteen times, in fact. In some classes there were over 50 wines tasted – quite a daunting task.
This experience has made the selection of the next wine of the month impossible. As you can see from the picture there were a great many wines – over 700 in fact – and we were able to taste them after the judges had finished with that class.