This week's London Wine Trade Fair has seen a plethora of announcements of winners: those of the Decanter World Wine Awards, the International Wine Challenge and the International Wine & Spirit Competition. My Inbox overflows with triumphant emails listing medals won.
I seem to have been overwhelmed by judging responsibilities myself recently, not of wines but of other materials, being a judge in three major competitions, all of which took much more time than I anticipated (my fault, doubtless).
Today, the first set of results of these deliberations, and those of my fellow judges, have just been announced at the London Wine Trade Fair, those of the first-ever Born Digital Wine Awards organised by the indefatigable Gabriella Opaz, her husband Ryan and Robert McIntosh. She reports, 'the inaugural awards proved an instant success, with an enthusiastic number of entries (in excess of 200), coming from 16 different countries across the world. The aim of the awards is to give value to writers and videographers who are successful at creating wine content online – it must be "born digital" to qualify – ie be published first online.'
The judges were:
- Jancis Robinson MW (that's me)
- Evan Schnittman (very switched-on digital publisher whom I met when he was at OUP but he is now at Bloomsbury)
- Elin McCoy of Bloomberg
- Patrick Schmitt of The Drinks Business
- Robert Joseph of the UK Hervé Lalau of Belgium
And the winners of the Born Digital Wine Awards 2010 are:
Best wine tourism feature
1 Wink Lorch Wine Days Out in the French Alps
2 Tom Florina Corsican Wines and Corsica, a twenty-year journey of discovery
3 Joe Roberts Endangered Species: Santorini Wine Fights for Its Survival
Best editorial wine writing
1 Tim Atkin Towards a New Chile (Part 1)
2 Blake Gray The 10 Most Overrated Wines
3 Jamie Goode Wine Tasting: Subjective or Objective
Best winery self-produced content
1 Randall Grahm On a Mission – The Germ of an Idea
2 Bernhard Fiedler Alkohol-Zunahmi
3 Brian Overstreet Hubris – It's Not Just for Icarus Anymore
Best investigative wine piece
1 Richard Ross Phylloxera- the English connection
2 Blake Gray : Sustainable Wines and Whole Foods Market
3 Alder Yarrow The Coming Carnage in the California Wine Industry
1 Jay Selman The Scent of Black
2 The Quoff Boys Palm Trees & 100 Year Old Port
3 Adrian Franklin Opening a Bottle of Port with a Feather
Very many congratulations to all of these talented wine communicators. The winner of each category receives €1,000, 2nd-prize winners won an Amazon Kindle, while those in 3rd place receive an Amazon gift certificate. We have given all those cited above 12 months' membership of our Purple pages, and they have also been made members of the European Wine Bloggers Conference.
Entries for the Born Digital Wine Awards 2011 should be submitted in Dec 2011 or Jan 2012.