Tasting nearly 1,000 wines blind is a serious business. And it’s something our buyers put themselves through each year as part of our Wine Champions offer. We’re keen to shed a little more light on Champs – how our buyers prepare themselves, some of their personal highlights, and why members should be excited about the wines that earn coveted Wine Champions status.
Wine Champions is an offer we run every year. Hundreds of wines from our range are organised by style or region into various tasting ‘flights’, then our buying team taste them blind – that is, without seeing the label. Wines that achieve top marks from at least 75% of tasters become Wine Champions.
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail
Tasting hundreds of wines across a couple of weeks is not easy (whatever people might think!). How do our buyers ready themselves for such a mammoth task?
Freddy Bulmer adopts the method-actor approach, putting together a training montage of himself tasting hundreds of wines, and spends a great deal of time planning his tasting outfits carefully – which are subject to his colleagues’ approval.
His colleague Matthew Horsley, who admits he takes Wine Champs ‘extremely seriously’, goes a step further. To ensure his palate is ‘tiptop’, he restricts himself to plain white bread and still water for an entire week before the tastings start.
Director of Wine Pierre Mansour does the opposite, fuelling himself with a ‘big breakfast’ each morning, and insisting that all tasting sessions take place before lunch, when taste buds are at their most receptive.
What makes a Wine Champion?
Very few wines earn coveted Wine Champion status, but what exactly are the buyers looking for? ‘The wine has to be balanced and have real length of flavour,’ says Matthew, adding that as the price goes up, he needs to get a sense of ‘the grape and where the wine was made’.
Freddy says that a Wine Champion must be ‘head and shoulders above the wines either side of it’ and that they must be ready for drinking now. Pierre likens winning bottles to athletes in their prime, absolutely at the top of their game: ‘It’s all about the moment, and we’ve picked the crème de la crème for members to try.’
Buyer highlights
The wines the buyers taste for Wine Champions are categorised into various flights, such as aromatic whites, Mediterannean reds, and so on. All of our buyers score their wines objectively, but like all of us, they have their favourites they look forward to tasting.
Freddy always eagerly anticipates the Rhône-style reds, which includes wines made with syrah/shiraz, and he also is an ever-present at the chardonnay and pinot noir sessions. Matthew’s highlight is the aromatic whites tasting, given his love of riesling, while Pierre was anticipating great things from South Africa and southern Europe this year.
Why should you get excited about Wine Champions?
The Society has many offers throughout the year, so what’s special about Wine Champions? Matthew explains that while bottles on our website or on our Lists having the backing of one buyer, the bottles that triumph in Wine Champions ‘have the backing of all buyers in the team, so that’s what really makes them stand out’.
Freddy concludes: ‘We’re doing a lot of the work for you, in a way, and we’ve selected wines that are absolutely perfect for drinking now, so you can’t go wrong. And another reason I’d like members to be interested is because I put my teeth through hell for this!’
Ready to explore our line-up of Wine Champions? You can find them all here.
