Unique to our Competition

CSWWC: A Competition with a Difference

The most important differences are [1.] all wines are judged exclusively by sparkling wine specialists; [2.] all wines are assessed by the same judges; [3.] we protect clear-glass bottles from the moment we unpack them; and [4.] we have a separate, isolated judge who opens a fresh bottle of all wines that fail to win a medal and compares it to the judged bottle to check for bottle variation … but a more comprehensive list of differences that make the CSWWC uniquely the most rigorous yet fairest (to both producers and consumers) wine competition in the world include:

• Judged exclusively by sparkling wine specialist. Many of the world’s greatest wine tasters struggle when tasting large numbers of sparkling wines. It has nothing to do with their tasting skills, and everything to do with the number of sparkling wines they taste and follow-up regularly on a professional basis. If they tasted as much we have, they would not be the type of experts they currently are, they would be sparkling wine specialists. We might taste large numbers, but they are no larger than your average, hard-working chefs de caves. It’s no big deal, it’s what we do.
• Tom Stevenson chose only the best sparkling wine specialists to assist him. Back in 2014 it was an easy choice: Essi Avellan MW and Dr Tony Jordan (who sadly passed away in 2019 and his position was filled by George Markus, after five years as reserve judge).
• Three equal judges, not four with the chair having a casting vote. Why create the potential of a hung jury when, with a panel of three, there is no need? If the judges are true experts, they should be trusted, not overruled. Hung juries might make good television, but the CSWWC is a wine competition, not Strictly Come Dancing or The X Factor. Every medal has to be agreed by all three judges.
• When the same judges assess every single wine, it is absolutely vital to have a permanent reserve judge on standby. The reserve judge tastes alongside panel, fully participating in the entire process, including all discussions after everyone’s score has been recorded, although his own score does not contribute to the medalling decision. This provides the reserve judge with an incomparable, intensive mentoring in the expertise required to evaluate sparkling wine quality technically, objectively and knowledgeably, keeping him “in the zone” should he be required to replace any judge who might drop out due injury or illness.
• Judging every wine exclusively by the same three sparkling wine specialists achieves incomparable consistency. Individuals with a different taste perspective may legitimately disagree with some of our judgements, of course, but what cannot be disputed is the unique yardstick of expertise that is brought to bear on the judging process, which embellishes each and every medal awarded with an unprecedented level of accuracy, not just within one year, but year-on-year.
• The initial judging of medals is strictly by terroir, with all entries tasted blind in competition with other wines of only the same origin and style. This applies to most other competitions, but it needs to be clarified here, even if it is not a unique feature, because there a few competitions that are judged stylistically whatever region or country the wines come from. That’s fine at a more subjective later stage, such as international trophies, but not from the start (in the view of the CSWWC), when it is essential to sort the hierarchy within a region or appellation.
• When the number of entries jump, we increase how long we taste, not the number of judges. This is for fairness and consistency.
• Eliminating bottle variation. As in most competitions, judges may call for second bottles of any wine suspected of being faulty and, at the CSWWC, individual judges do not have to justify such a request. Unique to CSWWC, a fresh bottle of every wine failing to win a Gold or Silver (including those that have already had second bottle tasted) will be opened and compared to the bottle already judged. If any significant sign of bottle-variation is found, the freshly opened bottle of that wine is seamlessly fed back into the judging schedule.
• Proactive prevention of light-struck aromas: if producers submit a light-struck wine, that is their fault (literally), but if a producer submits a clean wine in a clear-glass bottle, which then becomes light-struck under the care and supervision of a wine competition, it is reprehensible. In all competitions wines have to be identified, logged, numbered and sorted. This can only be achieved in light, natural or artificial, and there are several sorting stages, which can in total take many hours to complete. Wine competition photos available in the public domain show some bottles are kept sorted into tasting order for days, not just hours, yet the creation of DMDS, the primary volatile compound responsible for light-strike, takes just 60 minutes to start building when exposed to light. This process is accumulative, so they even if the bottles are stored in darkness for most of the time and exposed to light for just 10 minutes on six occasions, DMDS has started to build and cannot be stopped. The CSWWC thus instructs SWS, its logistics partner, to double-bag all clear-glass bottles the moment they are unpacked, and they remain protected like this for the duration of the competition.
• The CSWWC awards only Gold or Silver medals. Although every wine tasted is assessed in-house as Gold, Silver, Bronze, No Award, Possibly Faulty & Definitely Faulty, we made the decision from the very first competition in 2014 to recognise only Gold and Silver, so that CSWWC medals would be truly prestigious. For all except emerging regions, Bronze is third-rate by definition. Many producers would rather win nothing than have the world know they have won a Bronze, and who in their right mind would go out of their way to buy a Bronze medal wine? A wine competition Bronze is not an Olympic Bronze, which is given to the third-best in the world: it is a minor medal churned out by the thousands. So many, in fact, that up to 65% of all wine competition entries win Bronze or (in some cases) Commended. This makes for a lucrative bottle-sticker business, but we prefer to discourage producers from entering such wines (or at least enter a magnum to see if there is any merit whatsoever in the wines and, if there is, to work on preserving that quality in 75cl). CSWWC bottle-stickers are relatively rare, making them more prestigious.

If profit was the primary motivator, the CSWWC has shot itself in the foot by binning Bronze medals!

• We actively encourage entries in magnum. Part of the CSWWC’s mission is to promote the best sparkling wines at every price-point and from every area of the world, and one of the most important factors influencing the quality of any sparkling wine is the bottle format: the larger the format, the better the quality. The biggest jump in quality is between 75cl bottles and 150cl magnums because the neck space and cork are exactly the same and thus there is only half as much oxygen to wine in magnum, which slows down the ageing and as oxygen is vital to fermentation the so-called “magnum effect” begins during the fermentation, producing arguably a finer sparkling wine than a bottle that was filled with exactly the same base wine. This is reflected in the CSWWC results, where magnums represents 17% of all entries, yet are responsible for no less than 50% of all Gold medals and 50% of all Best in Class awards year on year. This is why the most switched-on collectors buy only magnums for longterm cellaring.
• Unlike virtually every other wine competition in the world, the CSWWC has no draconian restrictions when it comes to the availability of wines that may be entered. There are no minimum production levels or stock availability. We demand only that the wines must be available for purchase somewhere, even if that is exclusively from the cellar door and in the most restricted volume imaginable. This is because the CSWWC is a niche competition that seeks out the very best sparkling wine wherever they happen to be available and however restricted that availability is. If we find something truly special and there are only six bottles available from a tasting room in the middle of nowhere, we fully expect that there will be at least one fanatical fizz geek who is willing to jump on a plane, drive a thousand miles in a 4×4 and climb a mountain to buy the last bottle!