Have you ever wondered what The Society’s buyers make of the wines chosen by their own esteemed colleagues? If you are curious, the annual release of the list of The Society’s Wine Champions offers an insight.
Champs, as it’s affectionately known in Stevenage, celebrates some of the best, and best value, of The Society’s vast stocks of wines. These are selected through a series of tastings at which all the buyers come together to taste, deliberate and deliver a verdict. Clearly, not just the wines are under inspection. For the buyers, there’s also quite a lot of pride at stake.
In spring, I caught the train to The Wine Society’s Stevenage HQ to take part in the tasting session - one of fifteen - on which several dozen Rhône-style reds were under consideration. Director of Wine Pierre Mansour and buyer Fiona Hayes greeted me to explain the basics: no peeking under the bags that cover the labels to ensure each wine is tasted blind; take your own time to get round the room; and score each wine as a 0 (not a champ), 1 (possibly a champ) or a 2 (definitely a champ).
I had two questions. First, were the wines arranged in price order? I much prefer a tasting in which they are, especially when it’s blind. The answer: 'Yes, more or less.' Second, is there much competition between the buyers for places on the Champs list? Mansour, arguably one of the most affable and gentle men on the planet, looked at his shoes, then at me, then smiled slowly and gave a single word answer: 'Yeah.'
The original Wine Champions, set up more than 20 years ago by Sebastian Payne MW, then Chief Wine Buyer, was intended as a purely internal exercise. Relentlessly questioning and perennially eager for more knowledge, Payne had the idea of cross-examining The Society’s wines across the atlas. 'He would line up, say, all of our sauvignon blancs, wherever they came from in the world, and taste them together to get a sense of which the strong regions for that grape were that year, and which regions were over-performing,' says Mansour. 'Then they began to say, ‘These two sauvignons blancs out of the 57 we’ve tasted are amazing. We should be telling the members about them.’ And that’s how it evolved.'
Today, The Society’s Wine Champions is a huge operation, involving more than 800 different wines, large spreadsheets and co-ordinating the diaries of all the buyers so they’re not flying off all over the world. The tastings are still an important information-sharing exercise. As Mansour points out, The Wine Society buyers have an unusual level of autocracy. 'We talk [a lot] about buyer freedom and individuality here. But take Fiona [Hayes]. For the majority of the year, she’s out in the Rhône, Alsace, Eastern Europe, Germany... she’s seeing all that but she’s not getting much feedback from the others. So this is a great time for us all to meet up and to scrutinise.'
Victoria Moore's Wine Champions
A. A. Badenhorst Curator White, Coastal Region 2024
A de Château d'Arche, Bordeaux Blanc 2022
Perhaps it was the presence of an interloper (me) but the tasting room was extremely quiet on the day I joined it. 'Positively funereal,' barked CEO Steve Finlan when he dropped in to pay a visit. 'I’ll come back later when it’s more fun.' But picking the year’s Champs is a serious business. Tasting categories include, inter alia, Pinot Noir; Chardonnay; Aromatic Whites, Italian Reds, New World Bordeaux blends and Fortified & Sweet. I asked to do the Rhône and Rhône styles (red) day because these are my default house wines. I almost always buy French and wanted to be jolted into reconsidering. Sure enough, checking the crib sheet afterwards, I found we’d started with an Australian shiraz-cabernet and worked our way through seven more wines from Australia and South Africa before hitting anything from France and I hadn’t entirely noticed: a mark of where the value currently lies at the cheapest prices.
This is precisely the point. As buyer Matthew Horsley explained, the Wine Champions list can be used to seek out alternative versions of a favourite style or grape: 'In a year like this, when the 2024 Loire vintage was small, where are people going to get their sauvignon blancs and their chenin from? It's a chance to look at [things like] that.'
In tasting sessions, the moment of truth comes when everyone has tasted and the scores for each, at this point identified only by a number, are read out to be collated on a spreadsheet by Hayes. As an outsider, I asked for my marks not to be included, and just as well because I had scattered 1s liberally through the sheet: a common rookie mistake, apparently, because the standard is so generally high.
To win Champ status, a wine needs to gain 80% or more of its potential marks. Those with 50-79% of their possible points are retasted by the group and buyers are free to change their scores. This process results in a cordial round of, 'I’m happy to go to a 2 on that,' or a genteel but determined, 'No, I don’t think I’ll switch on that one.' Each buyer also has a joker to play, the Champs equivalent of going to Hawk-Eye, meaning a wine is re-examined, no matter what it scored.
'That’s where it gets quite interesting because occasionally you can tell a buyer might think they know what the wine is and they’re trying to kind of…' Mansour trails off, too polite to continue. I think we can finish the thought for him. And, yes, it was certainly possible to sense moments of frustration and discontent, albeit extremely well-mannered ones.
But the wines, what about the wines? The beauty of Wine Champions is that it illuminates bottles you might otherwise have overlooked. In the current release, two such bottles for me are The Society’s Barbera d’Asti 2021 Italy (£8.50 and excellent) and the lime-leaf cool of The Society’s Austrian Riesling 2023 Austria (£9.95). Both are now on my shopping list. But I also have new respect for the sharp palates of those Wine Society buyers, pitting themselves against each other as well as against the competition. They do it with such grace.
Victoria Moore
