NO MORE MINIMUM PRODUCTION REQUIREMENTS

Minimum Production Requirements Have Been Removed From The 2009 Competition's Conditions Of Entry. For about the Competition's first twenty years, as one of the successful Entrant's benefits, we exhibited the TOP 1OO Award winning wines in eight Australian cities, four New Zealand cities; also San Francisco, London and Frankfurt. The Competition covered all expenses, arranged sponsorships for Exhibition space with five star hotels, with airlines, air-freight companies, promotion through friendly retailers, exhibition staff and accommodation. The Exhibitions were conducted in civilised circumstances, attracting seriously interested wine consumers. The only cost to the Award winners was the tasting stock and even that was in the main limited to 27 ltrs of the Award winning wine. Such exposure! So little cost! In this way, we were able to introduce the Award winning wines to approximately 2,000 consumers, face to face, each year.

The reasoning behind the minimum production requirement was to try to ensure that consumers attending these Exhibitions and others who follow the Competition's results had some chance of purchasing the Award winning wines.

In about 1995, the Competition's first website was launched and has now taken over as the Competition's major promotional medium for each year's Award winning wines. By 2002, the Competition's website was attracting 300,000+ visitors a year, from all over the world. After the 2002 Exhibitions, except for our home base Sydney, we stopped exhibiting the TOP 1OO Award winning wines in other cities. By March 2008, site visitors exceeded 500,000 for the previous twelve months. That's not "hits", that's actual log-on visitors, and they come from, literally, all over the world. When talking in these numbers, trying to ensure that "consumers who follow the Competition's results" have some chance of purchasing the Award winning wines" is no longer a realistic objective. The Competition's results have become a vinous equivalent of an Exhibition of Fine Art. Not all will be available for purchase. Hence the decision to abandon minimum production requirements.