COMMENT: Putting Cyprus on the (wine) map

The Business of Wine and Food with Patrick Skinner

 

Despite the efforts of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation and the presence here, every year, of more than a million British tourists, it seems the international wine media has no idea of the geographical location of our lovely island. Recently, I had to upbraid the world’s biggest (natch!) publication, the American “Wine Spectator”, for including some Cyprus wines under the heading “Greece”. Now, along comes the annual Awards issue of Britain’s “Decanter” and this is where we find three awards for Cyprus wines…

I had opened my copy of Decanter to see details of which of 7,642 wines submitted in this year’s competition had won awards. I looked at the Contents page. And there quite clearly it said “Cyprus – Page 138”. In breathless anticipation I turned to page 138, to find it was the middle of ten pages of Chilean wines, not a sniff of Cyprus anywhere. So, I waded through every page, eventually finding four of our wines on page 200 in the section “Middle East, Far East and Asia”! The judge chairing the panel of this section was Mr Ch’ng Poh Tiong. The section was dominated by Israeli wines, with not a Lebanese in sight (strange!).

How could Cyprus be on this page? We’re an EU country and to prove it our wine industry will shortly receive EU funds for development. Plain ignorance I am afraid.  Anyway.

 

…Congratulations Vasa Winery, SODAP and Tsiakkas

 

Pambos Argyrides’ beautiful boutique winery at Vasa won two Bronze medals with his red St Timon and his Chardonnay. Well deserved. SODAP got another of their regular awards, a Bronze, for Island Vines White. Missing out on the medals but with a Commended sticker was Tsiakkas 2006 dry white.

This must be considered progress, but is it worth it? I suppose so! A Decanter Medal sticker on a bottle probably helps sell more wine. But the whole thing is something of nonsense – in reality it is mainly a means of securing more advertising revenue for the magazine. I am jaundiced because some of the best wines in the world are not entered – their producers don’t need to. Then, the long list of awards only confuses the consumer – many of the wines he can’t get hold of, whilst many others are unknown and, moreover, judged by people he’s never heard of.

Nevertheless, there has to be some bench-mark. And I am afraid there isn’t one that is accepted everywhere. Take marking. Decanter marks out of 20 (but with two decimal points, so in truth is marking out of 2000). Wine Spectator and Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate mark out of 100 (who can tell the difference between 90 and 91 points?)  Others mark from one to five stars (after much investigation and thought, this is my preference, simply because all judgments are personal and subjective).

Judgments being personal, who should you follow, when there are 10 to 12,000 wines launched every year? Readers of the London Financial Times are lucky because they have Jancis Robinson, a lady of tasting renown and enormous skill and dedication. Many other publications around the world also have good individual tasters. But if you want a complete over-view, my choice falls upon the Wine Spectator, who have five specialist tasters who divide the wines of the world regionally between them. Their judgments, being individual, have consistency and once you accept that the markings for American wines are generally higher than for others, you can form good judgments from the reviews.