Tuesday, 25 March, 2008

Dear Friends – in Food & Wine

"Ahh, it's a long and winding road to even some basic wine knowledge. It's a journey that keeps many of us fascinated for a life time. Meantime, you have our new website's "Help Me Find My Ideal Wine" Search Engine available to assist with your most important, but even your everyday wine choices."

HELP ME FIND MY IDEAL WINE

I thought the last bit of this correspondence with our Webmaster was quite amusing.

We are rather proud of our Website's Coder. Not only has he done a marvelous job tidying up our 2008 Competition's (recently launched) website: we have just learnt that his PhD thesis has been accepted. Smart fella! He has built a new Home Page Search Engine for us to help our site's home entertainer visitors (in particular) find the ideal wine to complement each dish of their menus. Hence the title. (But he doesn't know much about wine!)

Wine and food are natural partners. You know, instead of serving the same wine pre, post and all through the Lunch or Dinner, you drink less, maintain a high level of mental capabilities and can save money if you serve a glass of an appropriate wine with each dish?

One of our new Search Engine's search criteria is Grape Variety. If you particularly wanted a crisp, youngish Hunter Semillon to complement, say, the Crabmeat Salad you will serve, you could just specify Semillon from the Search Engine's drop-down list of grape varieties. From the 2008 Competition alone, that would offer a list of more than twenty wines from which to choose.

You could refine your search by inserting New South Wales as the Region to search (for offshore readers, the Hunter Valley is in New South Wales) and that would reduce the choices to nine wines from the 2008 Competition. Limit the search still further to just the Lighter Bodied Dry White Wines Category and you are down to just one wine.

Read the website's Judges' independent comments on that wine and you have probably found your ideal wine with which to complement your Crabmeat Salad Entrée. Phone the Winery's Customer Relations Officer, whose contact details are nominated on the chosen wine's own web page, for your nearest Retailer that stocks that wine. All questions answered. Chosen wine presented with the Crabmeat Salad Entrée. Symbiosis! Praise from Guests on your fine sensibilities!

Incidentally, you can also make your selection the other way around. Say you already have that wine in your Cellar and you want to find a suitable dish with which you can show it off at its best. There is a link on the website to take you to Recipes and photography of dishes alongside which the Judges have assessed wines from that Style Category over the past few Competitions.

Pinot Gris has not as yet been nominated as an individual variety in the Search Engine's drop down menu of Grape Varieties. Even though Pinot Gris is named as a Gris (equals Grey) grape, it is made almost universally as a white wine, and should be included in the catch-all "Other White Varieties" Category.

When I entered "Other White Varieties" into the Search Criteria, expecting to find the Pinot Gris wines, the search came up with a crazy response - it offered a Rosé and a Medium Bodied Dry Red wine. When this was pointed out to our highly intelligent, second-language English-speaking, non-wine drinking, teetotal website coder, he replied:

"Please remember that the word White has to be present in the Grape Variety for the wine to be listed as a result of the query."

Coding literate programmers will understand what he meant but I found his reply quite amusing, pointing out to our very bright non-wine drinking, teetotal website coder that virtually all wines entered into the Sydney International Wine Competition were produced from Vitis Vinifera grape varieties, mostly native to Europe's Mediterranean Region. Hardly any of these varieties have English words like "white" or "red" in their names. They are almost invariably named with French, Italian, Spanish or Portugese descriptors.

(By the time you read this, our Home Page Search Engine may have been modified. But you are probably going to try to replicate the mistake anyway, just to laugh at how differently website coders and winelovers think.)

Ahh, the long and winding road to some even basic wine knowledge. It's a journey that keeps many of us fascinated for a life time. Meantime, you have our website's Home Page "Help Me Find My Ideal Wine" Search Engine available to assist with your most important and even your everyday wine choices.

WHERE ARE THE TROPHY WINNERS LISTED?

We hear this question often? Organised by palate weight Style Categories, each Award winner has its own page showing the Judges' independent comments on that wine. The Awards that a wine has won are shown immediately under its name and above the graphic of its label. The aim is to encourage our Subscribers to choose the most suitable wine for the dish, rather than just go for the 24 Trophy winners, which may/may not be the most suitable wine for the dish. It's not unusual for a judge to suggest a particular wine would have been better suited to a dish other than that alongside which it was judged. To best enjoy these "judged with food" Award winning wines, enjoy them in context, in appropriate wine/food combinations at your dining table.

BANQUET PHOTOGRAPHY NOW UPLOADED

March's Banquet photography has been uploaded to our website. Click the Banquet Photography link on the Site Navigation Menu. We had two photographers operating on the day, one concentrating mainly on the Trophy Presentations and the recipients, the other concentrating on social groupings, atmosphere and the presentation of the food courses. For easy access, the gallery is presented in five self describing groups. For a better view, you can enlarge any of the thumbnails just by clicking on them. The images have been taken directly from large format, high quality digital cameras and can be downloaded free of charge for adjustment for any application: eg brochures, your own website, newsletter, posters, hi-res magazine reproduction, post cards, print enlargement for framing for cellar door presentation.

THE ROYAL ROAD TO TERROIR

"Biodynamics Is One Of The Most Important Trends In Modern Wine." This was the topic of Max Allen's Key Note Address to the Banquet, an abbreviated transcription of which is now available online. In this address, Max explains the basic principles of biodynamic farming, which is creating so much interest amongst Australian viticulturists but also in other parts of the wine producing world. Go to www.top100wines and, from the Site Navigation Menu, click Key Note Address. Max Allen, wine author and journalist, is also the publisher of www.redwhiteandgreen.com.au - a guide to biodynamic wines in Australia.

WHO IS THIS "WINE JUDGE" THAT CRITICISES MY WINE?

Sydney International Wine Competition is one of the very few major international wine shows which allows the consumer to read the honest, independent thoughts of each of the six or more Panelists that, collectively, pointed the wine into the Awards arena. And if you read the judges' comments on any of the Award winning wines, you will find that, nearly always, there is some dissent about that Award winner's merit. Wine producers and consumers learn to read these dissenting comments in context. The truth is that no matter how knowledgeable and experienced a judge may be, we are dealing with an individual's senses. It is good for a consumer to understand that. A consumer may disagree with the four or five judges in the Panel that supported a given wine and find his or her palate more in tune with the dissenting judge. That's fine! The whole process is aimed at helping you, the individual consumer, find wines that please you. That said, the only way a wine finds its way into the Awards arena of this Wine Competition is via the aggregate points given by the six or more Panelists when compared with the aggregate points amassed by each of the other contenders. The CVs of our 2008 Panel of Judges can be found here.

Warren Mason
Competition Director

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