Three IWSC trophies for Cape wines but weird rating system

10/2023 Mike Froud Leave a comment

96 points at Decanter Awards, Trophy at IWSC

WHO CAN BLAME the trophy winners at London’s International Wine & Spirit Competition for having mixed feelings about their success… Who would have thought it possible that the wines judged to be the best gold medallists on show would be given scores lower than those of some of the other gold medallists that didn’t go on to earn a trophy, and yet.

For a few years now, after the initial rounds of judging, the panels retaste all of the gold medal winners and award trophies to what they consider to be the wines most deserving regardless of their category – which is why you can have two or more trophy winners that are the same type of wine, same variety, same country. However, the scores aren’t adjusted during or after the trophy judging, so for example, in the case of the South African laureates at the 2023 edition of the competition, the trophy winners from Capensis (Stellenbosch), Durbanville Hills and Mont Rochelle (Franschhoek) retained the score of 95 that they were given initially, which is lower than the score of 96 retained by the gold medallists from Bloemendal (Durbanville), Constantia Glen and La Vierge (Hemel-en-Aarde)!

The competition entries included more than 7000 wines from more than 10 countries. Of these, just 24 were awarded trophies – the medal winners announced in August, the trophy winning wines announced early-October, the producer trophy winners to be announced a couple of weeks later.