“Smart Testing & Fine Wine Investing” Wine Contest Report 2019
1. Revolutionizing the Black Sea Region market
During 29–31 of May the city of Odesa, Ukraine held a series of wine-related events — the first in the history of Black Sea Region en primeur competition “Smart Testing & Fine Wine Investing”, National wine contest “Odesa Bay” and the scientific forum “Sensory analysis as the innovative mechanism of wine sales”.
The event was organized by Odesa Regional State Administration in partnership with Gustos.Life (operational and technical support and consultancy) and the Laboratory of Sensory Analysis of Odesa National Academy of Food Technology (Ukraine) (http://lsa.onaft.edu.ua/en) being part of OENOVITI network (https://www.oenoviti.com/) coordinated by the University of Bordeaux.
The testing activities were conducted using the designated spaces and equipment of the LSA ONAFT, where each jury expert was situated in a separate professionally equipped tasting booth and was isolated from a voice or even eye contact with other jury members and secured from any other distractions.
The transparency of the evaluation activities and the credibility of scores and ratings of current wine quality for ordinary wines the aging potential prognoses of the en primeur ones were guaranteed by the Gustos.Life software developed especially for such purposes. The event was recorded in real time using blockchain technology and the tasting process itself was streamed live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30unrSBnBlo
2. Special extents of traditional methodology
The wines featured in both contest “blind tasted” and evaluated by an international commission of experts with WSET certification (level 3–4) using a specialized wine tasting software with a blockchain backend that assures the transparency of the process and excludes the human factor https://winetaste.gustos.life/
While the Odesa Bay event used the scoring methodology of International Organization of Vine and Wine (O.I.V.), the unique for Black Sea region en primeur event required some extra extents of the methodology and scoring parameters that were elaborated by LSA specialists and integrated into the Gustos.Life software. For each wine sample, the Jury of 7 experts had to take into consideration the inevitable changes that the wine will suffer in terms of alcohol and tannins level, the acidity, aroma intensity and descriptors variety, limpidity, color and so on (the details of En Primeur wine evaluation will be covered in one of our next articles).
As a result, all the wine samples were rated on a 100 points scale with slightly different weight of each primary and secondary organoleptic characteristic for Still Wines and Sparkling wines. Following these standard regulations, Gustos.Life software offers an approved Wine score sheet model for each of the categories of the sample.
Each sample is rated based on the average of the scores resulting from the calculation of appraisals from each of the jurors, while the figures which differ by more than seven points ranging from the average rating are not taken into consideration while calculating the final sample score.
In certain cases, a sample may be eliminated due to a major defect. When a wine or a spirituous beverage is marked «eliminated» by at least two jurors, the sample under no circumstances receives an award by the jury.
The En primeur wines, besides the basic 100 points scale rating get their aging potential evaluation in terms of current readiness stage and prognosis of years before reaching the top quality.
3. Participants and Samples
Both consecutive wine competitions featured 175 samples of still land sparkling wines 120 of which were submitted by 33 wine producers from Ukraine for evaluation during “Odesa Bay” competition. Another 55 samples from 15 Ukranian and Republic of Moldova producers were assessed during en primeur competition — “Smart Testing and Fine Wine Investing”.
Traditionally, most of the submitted samples were Still dry wines, as the combined number of samples in other categories were less than 20% from the total for Odesa Bay competition and less than 10% for Smart testing and Wine Wine Investing.
More than 85% of the tasted wine samples were wines of the recent 2 years of harvest.
4. Commissions and Jurors
During both “Odessa Bay” and “Smart Testing & Fine Wine Investing” competitions the actual sample tasting was divided into 4 commissions (2 commissions per day). Each commission consisted of 7 jurors and for both Competitions, a combined number of 15 jurors took part in the wine evaluation activities.
An extremely important factor that proves the professional attitude of the event’s organizers is the Jury Calibration process that took a whole day before the competition and made possible avoiding any misinterpretations of the scoring methodology and any other misunderstandings between the jury members.
5. Awards and Final Scores
O.I.V. standards have a section regulating the score ranges for award granting, but leave the Event Organisers relative freedom in adjusting them. One of the only strict rules — not more than 30% of the samples featured at a competition can become award winners.
In order to make this report as accurate as possible, the data charts below will be calculated on the overall medal-worthy samples (score 80 points and above) and not the actual “Odessa Bay” and “Smart Testing & Fine Wine Investing” award-winning list limited by the 30% rule mentioned above.
As the main goal of the “Smart Testing & Fine Wine Investing” competition was the evaluation of aging (and thus — investment) potential of the submitted samples, the wines scoring higher than a certain point became the subject of investment negotiations. This way, the score categories are slightly different from the regular.
