For those who thought I stopped enjoying wine ...

Although I am not blogging a lot lately (understatemen of the year I guess) there is now a good reason to post something again in this blog: I just won the Wine World Taster Of  The Year 2012 Competition which was organised under sponsorship of Gault and Millau's Antwerp Wine Event.



For those that remember I tried this already two years ago (but did not even reach the final back then), but this time I am happy to say that I did not only make the final, but also won the competition which had a main theme my favorite wine country: Spain.

For the occassion this took place in 'de PIVA' which is Antwerp's most famous provincial highshool where a large number of chefs and sommeliers are studying on a daily basis.

Prize money was of the liquid kind and I have been told it is worth a fair amount of money, which I will probably never cash as I am too curious about how this expensive stuff tastes like.

Wine World Taster of the year competition

Today was my first participation of the "Wine World Taster of the Year" event held in Antwerp (already for the 12th year apparently) which is the only concours for non-professionals in Belgium I've been told.

Reaching the semi-final was (too) easy as it only required answering a few multiple choice questions at home (i.e. close to Google :-) ).
The semi-final however was difficult and I only scored 6/10 for the theoretical part. The practical part required "guessing" the grape and country of origina of 5 different red wines that were all served one-by-one (i.e. no way of comparing). On this part I only scored 1/5.
Clearly I did not reach the final (only 6 out of the 40 contestants were selected), but it may not have been far of as a friend of mine had 7/10 theory and 2/10 on the practical test and was selected for the final (he was 5th in the end)

All in all I am quite happy to have joined the game as it was big fun and I really enjoyed the associated winetasting a lot (more about that one in following posts). I will probably join next year's event as well.