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| |  | I have just returned from the London International Wine & Spirit Fair at which the results of the UK's wine competitions are released. We no longer submit our wines to these competitions; firstly, as we find the results inconsistent and secondly, we have through administrative errors not been acknowledged in the results when they have been printed. We don't submit our wines but some of our producers do, so I was interested to see how these wines had fared.
I was disappointed to see that the Heretat Vall-Ventós Blanco (there is no such wine, another administrative error) from our Penedès producer had only received a commended status ie the wine wasn't good enough to receive a medal. The Cabernet Sauvignon Crianza managed a bronze medal. Those of you who have tasted these wines and recognise the exceptional quality of them, might take issue with these results (so would we) but they are the results of the judges and shouldn't we accept that?
What concerned me was that the Cabernet-based blend of this producer's Reserva had impacted very differently on the judges at another competition some time before. This wine was one of only six wines from Spain to receive a trophy at the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles. The two results are not comparable as the wines are different but I continued to compare results.
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| I looked at the Peña Trevinca Rosado which had this year scored a bronze medal. A previous vintage had received a silver medal in the same competition but in the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, the wine achieved an almost unheard of gold medal (rosés aren't normally regarded as serious enough to warrant a gold medal). Again these wines were not directly comparable but my sense that the results were inconsistent remained. |  |
|  | I looked next at the Novellum Crianza 2005 from Rejadorada and the Oro de Castilla Verdejo 2007. This red and this white wine are reliable standards year-on-year and are made by two of Spain's and possibly Europe's, most technical and talented winemakers. The Verdejo from Rueda received a bronze medal and the Novellum from Toro a poor commended status. This shocked me. The Verdejo 2007 had just received another gold medal from the one of the most important competitions in France. The Novellum 2005 had just been awarded a gold medal at the Concours Mondial du Bruxelles for the third consecutive year as well as another gold medal in the global "Tempranillos al Mundo" competition. Last year the wine was good enough to collect a trophy at Spain's most prestigious wine competition and recognition by the authors of Spain's most respected wine guides as one of Spain's top Crianzas.
So how do these massive differences in opinion arise? Is there some natural bias built into European competitions outside the UK? |
| The competitions to which I have referred have taken place in Belgium, Spain, France and Portugal with judges from many different countries. The Concours Mondial uses a method deployed by a university statistics department to ensure that the marks take account of a tendency for some tasting panels to mark higher or lower than others. The wine industry's governing body, the OIV, supervises the methods used in the Premios Zarcillo.
Perhaps the other competitions are not representative? The Premios Zarcillo looked at 2,200 primarily Spanish wines and the Guía de Vinos Gourmets looked at only Spanish wines - nearly 3,500 of them!
In conclusion, I don't know the reason for the inconsistencies between UK and other European competitions but what I can say it that Spain's finest wines, and that means those on our website, consistently do well in the most significant European competitions, reviews from well-recognised critics and are selected by accomplished chefs and sommeliers in the UK's and Europe's finest restaurants. That is why I encourage you to try them. |  |
| ![SPANISH WINE = RIOJA]() | SPANISH WINE = RIOJA
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| Sherry, Cava and Rioja are wines from Spain. These facts are widely understood by the UK consumer. The difficulty now is that consumers of Rioja see it as a commodity which they buy in the supermarket in just the same way that they buy their Cava.
Buyers of commodities normally work with an established market price and independent merchants attempting to compete have to supply Rioja at the same price. To do so and maintain their profits means cutting out the importer's margin. Recently I was informed of a promotional trip to Rioja for independent retailers. Perhaps I should not have been surprised to find three of my trade customers attending. I took issue with the organisers whose defence was that they would not be visiting any suppliers of wines to supermarkets. I wondered how they would know. The UK's largest Rioja brands are anonymous supermarket own labels. |
|  | What worries me much more is that the self-perpetuating promotion of Riojan wines is at the exclusion of all others. Each year significant expenditure is focused on trying to increase the 3.5 million cases of Rioja sold in the UK but it is hardly surprising that the next best-known quality DO, Ribera del Duero, with no promotional spend, sells a mere 3,250 cases (2,000 through Waitrose). Given this low level of sales, it is understandable that a UK magazine described the response to a recent call for samples for a competitive tasting as "disappointing". |
| TThe proliferation of wine regions in Spain with no effective marketing (and no clear points of difference except as a source of cheap wines) means that these wines are largely irrelevant to the volume market. We have seen no effective campaigns to educate consumers to world-class wines from Rueda, Rías Baixas and Toro. Even supermarket buyers have confessed to me that they see little point in trying to sell any other Spanish wines than Rioja. A promotional press event recently showcasing "Green Spain" lead to, as far as I can see, one single press article despite the presence of Spain's "Best White Wine." The situation is summed up in the Riojan promotional campaign's own document "Spain, for many UK wine drinkers, is synonymous with a single classic wine region; Rioja."
Given their pre-eminent position, do Riojan wine producers have nothing to fear? Firstly they need to remember that they are producing wine from largely bought-out grapes in a Western European economy. To understand the significance of this in the world's most competitive wine market, we need to consider global comparisons. When a price and quality survey was conducted of globally available wine brands, the researchers had to exclude the UK results for Torres Coronas as they were unable to find any on UK supermarket shelves. So low was the price point required by the UK supermarkets that even Torres' economies of scale were insufficient to allow a profitable supply. And Torres' response? We shouldn't forget that Miguel Torres was at the forefront of buying land in South America from where he could produce good quality Tempranillo unfettered by regulatory requirements with a Developing World cost base.
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| | My biggest concern is that this focus on a single wine is not building market share for Spanish wines overall despite replanting programmes having doubled the volumes of the Tempranillo grape used in Riojan tintos.. The latest global competition "Tempranillos al Mundo" showed good results for a number of Australian producers. I also remember a vertical tasting conducted some years ago of Tempranillos from Argentine producer Zuccardi. Each wine was matched to a Rioja of the same age. Members of the press present were quite clear that in each pairing they preferred the Argentine wine. Then a little known wine from Rioja Alavesa was tasted. The Crianza from Fernández de Piérola provoked a debate about the quality level to which both Rioja and Zuccardi should aspire. |
|  | Let's look at the experience in Spain. Commenting on the "Riojitis" affecting the Catalan market, the Minister of Agriculture despairingly admitted that "a land which does not consume its own wines has an identity problem." This followed an announcement that Riojan producers are supplying 36% of the Catalan demand for wine and the eleven Catalan regions between them supply only 27.7% of their home market.
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| Despite having achieved a widely held reputation for producing Spain's most expensive wines in Catalan Priorat, we have been unable to find examples of the mineral-rich wines from old vines which the Gratallops Club pioneered - just lots of expensive imitators from newly planted vineyards. Disappointingly, having a reputation is not sufficient to deliver commercial success for the Catalans.
Within Catalonia, Penedès stood out for us due to the depth of experience and age of vineyards growing "international" grape varieties. Had the trophy-winning Bordeaux-blend of our producer Heretat Vall-Ventós been produced in South Africa, Australia or California, we are confident that we would have had an impressive demand for the wine. Instead we have found it virtually impossible to get UK buyers to taste it.
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| If the Catalan wine market has been so impacted by "Riojitis", are there any lessons to be learned from the most successful Penedès producers, companies like Torres, Freixenet and Codorníu? These companies have all invested outside Spain not only in countries with lower cost economies but also in countries with sizable wine markets. Within Spain they have moved fast to set up production facilities in those locations which we believed had a sustainable future, Priorat, Ribera del Duero and Toro. But the biggest Spanish investments outside Penedès for Torres and Freixenet have been in, historically, Spain's most important wine location…..Rioja Alavesa. QED! |  |
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