Let's Meet Up!

Events during winter 2024 and a quick update from the road.

Oct 30, 2024

∙ Paid

I’m currently on the road, just finished judging at the Asia Wine Trophy in Daejeon, Korea. Maybe I’m not the biggest fan of wine competitions - read my detailed views on them here - but the Asia Wine Trophy is an exemplary event, professionally run and with a very high quality of judges. It has been an absolute pleasure.

This year I chaired a panel dedicated purely to orange wines - a first for this competition. We judged around 200 wines over four days, almost all orange/amber and mostly from Georgia and Slovenia, with a smattering of Australia, Chile, Italy, Spain and others. Some great and surprising wines. I can’t wait to see the results to discover what our favourites were - as with all competitions of this type, the wines are shown blind and as judges we don’t find out their identities until after the event.

It’s always challenging to research and write articles while travelling, so this week I’ve republished one of my pieces from the last issue of Noble Rot. It’s free to read, so do share widely if you enjoy it!

Hail Czar!

Simon J Woolf

Oct 30

Fortunato Garcia, a schoolteacher based on the Azores island of Pico, has just spent two hours telling me how his late harvest wine Czar went from €15 a bottle in 2006 to a special release which he’s now pre-selling for €7,500. That’s per bottle. As I wonder if I’m more likely to die of shock or thirst, he opens half a dozen vintages spanning 1991 to 20…

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Events, Winter 2024

Now, about meeting up - I’ve got a few upcoming events, and it’s always a special pleasure to meet my subscribers in person. Some of these are in my home-town Amsterdam and some are further afield. Here they are:

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