Annually there are hundreds of wine competitions held around the world. The team at Monte Creek Winery hand-selects a few to submit our wines to. The competitions with the highest degree of difficulty due to both the quality of the judging panels and the competition are the ones we choose to participate in.
Wine tasting is subjective to consumers, so producers turn to professional critics to rate the quality, balance and varietal expression of their wines. Wine competitions are a way to gauge how our wines are standing up nationally and internationally compared to other producers. A panel of judges is comprised of leading wine professionals, Masters of Wine, Master Sommeliers, other winemakers and wine critics. They follow strict tasting rules, and all wines are tasted blind. This means judges don’t know whose wine they are tasting. They will know they are tasting a flight of Riesling, but nothing beyond that.
There are a couple of ways wines are judged at competitions. They can be judged against each other and given a medal for their placing, and they can be given a score out of 100.
Competitions are also a way to reach and appeal to customers. If your wine is awarded a ranking or medal, these wins can be promoted on your bottles with a sticker. It’s challenging for customers to select a new wine in a liquor store if they’ve never tasted it before. Now, if the wine has a medal sticker on them, a customer may be inclined to try something new if it won an award.
For 2022, Monte Creek Winery brought home a number of prestigious medals from wine competitions around the world. We will dive a little deeper into each of these now.
Decanter World Wine Awards
This is the world’s largest and most influential wine competition. For 2022, 250 international wine experts tasted wines from 54 counties. In total, there were 18,244 wines entered the Decanter Wine Awards competition. Monte Creek Winery brought home the following awards:
90 Points – 2020 Living Land Pinot Noir
90 Points – 2020 Ancient Waters Pinot Noir
WineAlign
WineAlign National Wine Awards of Canada is Canada’s largest wine competition. They had 1,887 entries from over 250 different wineries from eight different provinces. The team at Monte Creek Winery won the following accolades:
Gold – 2020 Living Land Chardonnay
Gold – 2021 Living Land Riesling
Silver – 2020 Living Land Cabernet Franc
Silver – 2020 Ancient Waters Chardonnay
Silver – 2020 Living Land La Crescent
Silver- 2020 Living Land Sparkling Rose
All Canadian Wine Championships
This is Canada’s oldest wine competition which held its first event in 1981. They received 1,233 Canadian wines from 194 wineries this year. We are pleased to say that Monte Creek Winery received the following medals:
Double Gold – 2020 Living Land Cabernet Franc
Gold – 2020 Living Land Chardonnay
Gold – 2019 Living Land Cabernet Merlot
Gold – 2020 Hands Up Red
Silver – 2021 Hands Up White
Silver – Blueberry
Quality, along with sustainability and innovation, are our core values at Monte Creek Winery. It’s great to see top critics from some of the top competitions in the world acknowledging the efforts and commitment to excellence at Monte Creek Winery.