Gold List 2013
Close to 1900 entries, from all corners of the world, have been tasted, assessed and re-tasted to create the Sommelier Wine Awards Gold List for 2013
There are three elements that really make the Sommelier Wine Awards different. One is the fact that the submitted wines can’t be in the mass-market high street; another is that the tasters are almost all sommeliers or on-trade wine buyers. But the third – and perhaps the most radical – is what you see when you view all the Gold medalwinners together: the Gold List.
Because although we do give out medals – like other wine competitions – our final goal is somewhat different: to create an ultimate wine list from the wines sent in. A working wine list, this encompasses an amazing selection of award-winning wines, and would, if transplanted into any venue in the country, also give that eatery the full range of prices and wine-styles to choose from to suit every customer and every food-matching need.
As with any wine list, this one right here is a combination of pragmatism and romance; of hard-headed logic and poetic indulgence; of compromise, calculation and an occasional burst of ‘what-the-hell’ impulsiveness.
To help ensure that we really got the right wines on our Gold List this year, we called on Hakkasan’s Christine Parkinson (one of the winners of Imbibe’s Wine List of the Year competition 2011) to oversee the final compilation of the Gold List.
Potential Golds and Silvers came in from our tasting teams, and, in her role as Gold List Co-ordinator, she retasted them all. Occasionally wines were up- or downgraded for quality reasons, occasionally to ensure better balance in the Gold List where she felt the tasting teams were being over-enthusiastic or over-harsh with a category.
But her role as a final, level-headed assessor was crucial in creating the best-balanced list we’ve ever had. If you look through the results in the various categories, you’ll see a lot of wines at the Silver medal level. These, often, are wines that the sommeliers loved – but simply couldn’t find room for on the final list. Having a limited number of spaces and large number of wines to choose from, it’s sadly inevitable that a lot of good wines miss out.
All of which means two things: firstly, that you can find a lot of really good wines in the Silver and Bronze categories, and secondly that the 176 wines that did make it onto the Gold List aren’t just great in their own right, they have been deemed commercially viable as well – and they have also proved their worth over a three-stage judging process featuring some of the on-trade’s very best palates.
This year in our Gold Booklet published with the magazine, we’ve presented our Gold List in the style of an actual restaurant list, with page numbers linking you to the actual results, which follow with full analysis. Online you can find all the winners via the Gold List Winners Quick Link on the SWA Results Page
So please do take a look through the Gold List. It should be your first port of call if you’re looking to add wines to your own list – whatever kind of establishment you run.
Chris Losh, competition director