Once again this year, I was privileged to be one of the invited judges for the World Wine Expo that happens every year in November in Moncton. The wines are submitted by agencies in plenty of time to be judged, medals awarded, and the extra wines ordered for the show to meet the extra demand for those wines created by their winning medals.
Unlike the Nova Scotia "medals" these ones are actually earned in a publically judged, unbiased, blind competition.
There were three judges from Nova Scotia, and the remaining 5 from New Brunswick.
In order to do this work, and trust me, it is work, I have to do something I am not good at. That is, spitting, or as I see it, not drinking, wine that I have put the effort into getting into my mouth. My spitting, unlike some experts, tends to create a partial drool down my chin that I am constantly wiping off, resulting in a slightly darker part of my face from mouth to chin after a while. With red wines, anyway.
I got to judge with a famous NB wine personality - the guy whose picture is on the shelves in the ANBL stores recommending certain wines, with food matches. This competition, again, unlike the Nova Scotia medal designation process, is not run by the government monopoly. Unlike comparably backward Nova Scotia, the ANBL recognizes that the public sector might have some knowledge of wine, and cooperates very effectively with the Canadian Association of Professional Sommeliers. In fact, the two people in the New Brunswick organization who choose wines to list are both CAPS members, fully certified sommeliers, and good ones at that.
After the hard work (I judged and scored 83 wines over 4 hours, I think), we got to see the wines we had scored (medal categories will be done statistically) and we were happy with how we had done, in terms of matching our preferences with published reviews in other places, and general reputations of some of the entrants.
We then sat down to a very good meal of soup, steak and baked potato, from Bruno's, the in-house restaurant at the Fredericton Delta. The soup was great, a creamy buttery mushroom soup capped with a baked on top pasty crust.
Then we drank as many of the wines as we could (you can only pretend to be a sedate, stately judge type for so long, eh?). There were 149 of them and that represented a lot of work! I stopped sometime around 4 am. After all, I had to get up and drive to Moncton in the morning, to do some work during the day, and to attend another wine event there that evening.
There were some good ones left to drink, and the organizer, strategically, allowed us to drink them all, thus conveniently forgetting which wines will probably get gold medals, and keeping them secret for the media launch. But if you are a wine geek, you can make some guesses from what I have written.
2 comments:
"After all, I had to get up and drink to Moncton in the morning."
I think (and hope) you mean "drive." Excellent Freudian slip, though.
I think I'll leave it there. I like some of Freud's theories. A Blog, for instance could be construed to be a sort of an adulthood superego, a catalogue of things to avoid, and places to return to, a chronicle of experiences. Even those like drinking one's way to Moncton. I have done that, by the way, but it was on the train. From Montreal to Moncton. We ran out of things to drink in Moncton. Or fell asleep, all of a sudden-like.
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