Year 10, Number 7

Sep 25, 2020

Year 10, No. 7

Greetings,

Here where I'm based in Southern Catalunya, Spain, the harvest is grinding its way down into a finish. Obviously, this isn't the harvest that anyone foresaw at the start of the year when optimism flowed... and before the rains came... and then stopped, giving way to an abrupt boost of temperatures, no rain, and a short maturation cycle.

Will 2020 be a classic year? Definitely not, but a number of wineries I've talked to are confident that they'll still make their top wines even though grape losses have been from 30-80% due to mildew and other issues. As to where they'll be selling these 2020 wines in a couple of years, well, that's a question to ponder another day.

But this has been a year for pondering if nothing else which is why two of the articles included here elaborate on topics I've been thinking about for some time. The first focuses on how to reboot the wine writing competition as we're at a crossroads on the awards front. The other is looking into how one wine competition took a novel approach to deal with all travel plans being cancelled in the spring, meaning their judges couldn't come to judge. Yikes.

Lastly, as you may have noticed, I've reworked the newsletter to "spice things up" a bit and will be evolving it more over time, so please let me know what you think!

-Miquel

FEATURED ARTICLE

Rethinking the wine writing award

The Roederer Awards were the most venerable and well-known awards for wine writing but they've ended this year. Maybe it's time to look at how to build an even better award for this writing niche going forward.

AND NOW THIS