The Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships 2016 announces Gold & Silver medal results

Monday, 11 July, 2016
The Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships
The Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships (CSWWC) is delighted to unveil a record number of 149 Gold & 143 Silver medals for 2016, all of which are now available to view at www.champagensparklingwwc.com/results/results-2016

All the Champagne Gold & Silver medal winners can also be found here.

With the unrivalled sparkling wine experience of our three judges (the “Dream Team” of Tom Stevenson, Essi Avellan MW and Dr Tony Jordan), it is little wonder that no other competition can boast the breadth and quality of entries that the CSWWC receives. With 22% more entries than last year and producers competing from no less than 26 countries, including first time participants from Armenia, Croatia, Moldova and Ukraine, the CSWWC is the largest and most relevant sparkling wine competition in the world.

France gained the largest haul of Gold medals with a fantastic 69, of which 67 were awarded to Champagnes and the others two from the Loire. The judges were delighted to discover that not only were Champagne entries significantly higher this year, but that 25% of the participating producers were growers, enabling them to award “Best Grower Champagne” for the very first time. They were also particularly impressed by the quality of the Italian, Spanish and the English entries, with 30, 11 and 16 Gold medals awarded to these countries respectively. The Italian Golds were dominated by wines from Franciacorta (14) and Trentodoc (11). Of the New World countries, Australia romped home with 9 Gold and 9 Silver medals, closely followed by New Zealand and Argentina.

The judges were thrilled to award their first Gold medals to Hungary and China! As Tom Stevenson, Founder and Chairman of the Judges, explains “With the spread of technology and expertise world class sparkling can now be found in countries where the fizz was undrinkable or non-existent 10 years ago.”

The Best in Class, National Champions and four World Champions by Style will be revealed at this year’s CSWWC Awards Dinner at Vintners’ Hall in London on 1st September. These awards will be published in Q3 Issue of The World of Fine Wine magazine, which is due out later that week, while tasting notes and price categories for all this year’s Gold and Silver medal winning wines in addition to a full listing of the awards will be published in Tom Stevenson’s Champagne & Sparkling Wine Guide 2017 (due out in October 2016).

Tom Stevenson went on to say “It is worth reiterating for any journalist or publication new to this competition that we taste blind (which is to say we have no knowledge of the identity of each wine beyond its origin, basic style and grape varieties); we judge medals and Best in Class strictly in flights of the same origin and style (Cava Rosé exclusively against Cava Rosé, Australian Blanc de Blancs exclusively against Australian Blanc de Blancs etc.); we judge wines conventionally as Gold, Silver, Bronze, Commended, No Award, Possibly Faulty and Definitely Faulty,  but we award – unconventionally – only Gold and Silver medals because these are the truly outstanding wines; and we only judge in flights of different style for National trophies and different origin for World Champion trophies.

“Although we do not award medals lower than Silver, we take a keen interest in theoretical Bronze winners. With a Bronze from a classic sparkling wine appellation, it is easy for producers to submit a magnum the next year and almost guarantee a Silver or even a Gold because the difference in quality between a regular 75cl bottle and a magnum of effectively the same wine is truly that great. However, when a Bronze is from a relatively obscure, unknown or untested region, they have virtually no local expertise to assist them, so it is important for those producers to understand that they could be on the verge of achieving a world class sparkling wine. We make the judges’ notes for such wines exclusively available on a confidential basis and recommend they use this feedback to fine-tune their improvements. The competition becomes a record of their progress and, hopefully, it will eventually lead to a Silver or Gold medal. There were 195 theoretical Bronze medal wines this year. They won nothing, but they can and should give hope for the future.”

The CSWWC is the first and only terroir-driven competition judged exclusively by internationally renowned fizz experts who taste each and every wine submitted to guarantee an unprecedented level of consistency and accuracy of the medals awarded.

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The Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships
The Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships

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