GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – France leaves us with no doubts: they are the world’s Chardonnay masters, based on 872 wines from 42 countries that were judged at Château des Ravatys, the wine estate of the Pasteur Institute at Saint Lager in Burgundy, France this week. The Chardonnay-du-Monde wine competition‘s top 10 wines included 7 from France. Canada had an ice wine among the top 10 and South Africa and the Czech Republic each had a winner.
Switzerland had 17 wines that won medals, three of them gold – and two of those went to the Cave de Genève, whose reputation has been growing. The new awards will help seal its name for fine wine: it won gold for its Genève AOC La Nomade Chardonnay 2011 and a sparkling wine, Baccarat Blanc de Blancs Chardonnay Brut.
Neuchatel producer Thiebaud & Co. won gold for a sparkling wine, Neuchatel AOC Cuvée Prestige Louis Thiébaud Chardonnay Brut.
Five of the Swiss winning wines are oaked and six are sparkling wines. They come from cantons Aargau, Geneva, Neuchatel, Vaud, Valais, and the three lakes region, thus representing all of the six wine-growing regions in the country.
Overall, the competition awarded 58 gold medals and 183 silver.
A new country taking part this year was Burma/Myanmar.
And a new “tool” has left me intrigued and a little baffled:
“The use of a new Professional Tasting Instrument resulting from applied research. In addition to organising a flawless competition is the desire to improving the reliability of measuring instruments. This resulted in the adoption of a professional wine-tasting glass for the tasting of sparkling Chardonnay wines. This new tool tested by judges of Effervescents du Monde (www.effervescents-du-monde.com) is an INAO-type tasting glass that contains a precise number of nucleation sites. The objective of this new wine-tasting glass “Fleur d’Effervescence“ is to optimize the tasting of sparkling wines, to calibrate their degree of effervescence, to control the formation of bubbles and to enable ideal expression of the foam…