Why we release only Gold & Silver Medals
The greater the reputation of a wine producer, the greater the potential risk of entering competitions, because a poor result can be very costly. Rightly or wrongly, it is a fact of wine competition life that some of the very best wines are never entered, leaving the consumer mystified over whether these wines are as special as they are made out to be.
How do we get around such a conundrum?
If the goal of a competition is to reward excellence and to guide consumers to the very best wines, the answer is simple: we raise the bar.
Other competitions guarantee anonymity to those wines that do not manage to win Commended (or its equivalent), but we have raised that bar two rungs to Silver medal. For Deluxe Champagnes it is even tougher. As these iconic Champagnes demand a hefty premium, we believe it is not unreasonable to expect a hefty quality premium in return, thus we demand a minimum of Gold medal quality from any Deluxe Champagne that enters the CSWWC. This effectively guarantees that producers of the most iconic Deluxe Champagnes can enter our competition knowing they will either win a top award or remain anonymous.
We are not however exclusively elitist. We also want to find the absolute best quality sparkling wines of all origins, styles and price points. Furthermore newcomers can be just as nervous as producers of established icons are about entering a competition, thus for all other Champagnes and any other sparkling wine we demand a minimum of Silver medal quality (and a good Silver should be exciting!).
This not only opens our door to the best quality and best value sparkling wines in the world, but also ensures that all of our winners are all truly special because they are all either Gold or Silver medal winners. Some cynics might think that we are simply hiding the names of the underperformers and to a degree they would be right, but that is a price we happily pay to attract such a high level of quality from every corner of the winemaking globe and, it should be added, many of our “underperformers” (Bronze and Commended) we do not bother to announce would be “winners” in other competitions.
