Editor TLN
An elaborate deception with a bad wine, ended up demonstrating the lack of professionalism of a prestigious wine contest.
A supermarket wine for 2.5 eurosthe baddest a sommelier could find, ended up winning the Gilbert & Gaillard International Wine Competition. The story of how she got it is quite curious and revealing.
exist hundreds of competitions or wine tastings in Europeand in many cases they are just a commercial business that benefits all parties. Marketing says that the wines who wear a gold medal from a contest, sell 15 or 20% more. At the same time, these contests charge money for participating, and for each medal that is placed in a bottle.
There would be nothing wrong with this if the tasting was impartial and the best wines were rewarded. Surely in many contests it is like that. But it doesn’t seem like the case Gilbert & Gaillard International Wine Competition who charges 50 euros for participating and sells the winners 1,000 medal labels to put on the bottles, for 60 euros, according to OddityCentral.
The wine contest trap
belgian tv show On n’est pas des pigeonscolluded with Eric Boschman, chosen as the best sommelier in Belgium in 1988to elaborate the joke.
Boschman looked in a supermarket the baddest wine he could find. cost 2.5 euro the bottle. After designed a fancy label and they invented the origin of the wine. They baptized it as Chateau Colombiermade with grapes of the Côtes de Sambre and Meuse (Wallonia) varieties.
The tasting requires presenting laboratory data with alcohol and sugar levels, so they handed over a token for a prestigious wine.
Days before the contest sommelier Eric Boschman advertised the wine on social mediacalling it “exceptional” as the opinion of famous sommeliers is known to influence their professional colleagues.
The elaborate trap worked perfectly. This bad supermarket wine won the gold medal at the Gilbert & Gaillard International Wine Competition.
The judges described it as “Bright garnet red colour. Shy nose that combines stone fruits, currants, discreet oak. Smooth, nervous and rich palate with young and clean aromas that promise a pleasant complexity. Evolution on fine spices and a touch of soot. Very interesting“.
The result reveals, first, that they did not check the laboratory analysis. And second, what their sommeliers did not do their job well when tasting the winesor that perhaps they were carried away by the campaign that had been carried out Eric Boschmannfalsely praising him.
It does not mean that all wine tastings and competitions are like this, far from it. But this bad supermarket wine that won an international wine contest It shows that, at least in some, the commercial aspect prevails, and the quality of the wine itself is left in the background.
