By Sourish
Bhattacharyya
 |
| Steven Spurrier (above) and Jeannie Cho Lee, Asia's first Master of Wine, co-charied the Decanter Asian Wine Awards 2013 panel of 44 experts |
IT HAPPENS to the best of Indian restaurants — they never
make it to any respectable rank on any global ‘best list’. Indian wines, too,
seem to be suffering from a similar crisis of acceptance.
Indian wines — 16 of them — cut a sorry figure at the Decanter Asian Wine Awards (DAWA) 2013,
whose results were officially released in Hong Kong on October 23. In a
competition where a Japanese entry, Grace
Winery’s 2012 Gris de Koshu, won a gold medal and regional trophy for its
white wine made 100 per cent with Japan’s signature Koshu grapes, the Indians landed with one silver, nine
bronze and four ‘commended’ medals.
The country’s pride was somewhat salvaged by Sette VII, the brilliant
Sangiovese-Cabernet Sauvignon blend developed by the celebrated Italian
winemaker, Piero Masi, at the Fratelli winery at Akluj in
Maharashtra’s Solapur district. Last year, when the first DAWA was held in Hong
Kong, the Sauvignon Blanc 2012 of Sula
Vineyards returned home with a silver.
To console themselves, Indian winemakers can draw solace from
the performance of their Chinese counterparts, though on an Olympic-style medals
tally China would rank higher than India because of its two silvers. Of the 36
Chinese entries, only one-half got a medal — two got silver, five bronzes and
11 ‘commended’ medals.
If this seems to you to be somewhat like India’s performance
in the Olympics, rest assured you are not over-reacting. For starters, at DAWA,
unlike in the Olympics, just about every competitor gets a medal. This year, 44 experts from across the world, including Indian Wine Academy President Subhash Arora, judged more than 2,300
entries and gave away prizes to 2,023 of them (it seems like the tally of votes
that used to be cast in elections in the old Soviet Union — 99.99 per cent for
the ruling dictator, making you wonder what happened to the remaining 0.01 per
cent!). Of the 2,023 award winners, 39 got a regional trophy, 45 gold medals,
369 silvers, 985 bronzes and 585 ‘commended’ medals.
As you can deduce from these numbers, getting a bronze or a
‘commended’ medal is not the same as practising rocket science. A major source
of revenue of competitions such as DAWA 2013 is the amount each participating
winery pays for each wine entered in the competition. It is therefore in the
best interests of the organisers to send all but a very few of the entries —
these must be really undrinkable wines — back home with a medal, which explains
the deluge of metal in the wine competition.
Co-chaired by Jeannie
Cho Lee, the first Asian Master of Wine and a contributing editor to Decanter, the English-speaking world’s
most authoritative wine magazine published from London and circulated in 92
countries, and Steven Spurrier,
Chairman, Decanter World Wine Awards, and the magazine’s consultant editor,
judging took place in Hong Kong on 16-19 September 2013. Sarah Kemp, Publishing Director, Decanter, said in a media release, “All wines were tasted blind and
judged by a panel of Asia’s finest palates, and only those which represent
outstanding quality are endorsed with a Decanter Asia Wine Award medal.” The
Decanter World Wine Awards, incidentally, are the most prestigious in their
category.
The competition leader, without doubt, was Australia, which participated
with 614 entries and scooped up 18 gold medals and 11 regional trophies. Australia
had done well in the Decanter World Wine Awards as well. In Europe, Italy’s Veneto area bagged four regional
trophies and four gold medals from 84 entries. The surprise of the event was,
to quote Decanter.com, a “revitalized” Languedoc-Roussillon
(France), which went home with two regional trophies from 59 entries, compared
with just one from 88 entries for Bordeaux.
“In today’s wine world, particularly in Asia, nothing, not
even historical reputations, can be taken for granted,” noted Spurrier, writing
on DAWA 2013 in his column for the Decanter
magazine’s upcoming December issue. The task for Indian winemakers is a little
more difficult. They have to build their reputation before they can stake claim
to history.
To know more about DAWA 2013, go to:
http://www.decanter.com/news/wine-news/584469/dawa-2013-results-japan-claims-first-decanter-regional-trophy
and http://dawa.decanterchina.com/en/2013/
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