I am thrilled to announce that Wines Unlimited has received its very first wine-making award. Late last year, I finally got around to making some wines for myself – not such an easy task when we are as busy as we usually are at Wines Unlimited making upwards of 150 batches of wine every month!!!
So finally, in October 2013, I decided to make some wine for the Christmas holiday period. I have always loved a Chateau-neuf-du-Pape wine (a full-bodied red wine which generally has up to 17 different kinds of grape varietals blended together). That number of grape varieties was a bit ambitious at the time so I started off by blending a Cellar Classic Winery Series Grenache Syrah (one of more popular “skins” wines) and a 6 week juice Merlot. I was pleasantly surprised by the resulting blend and hence in March of this year I decided to enter my wine in one of the Blended Red wine categories of the 2014 Wine Maker International Amateur Wine Competition.
The 2014 Wine Maker International Amateur Wine Competition is the largest wine competition of its kind in the world with over 3,111 entries submitted from winemakers all over the world. Over the course of three days, experienced judging panels worked through the wines, examining each and using a standard scale, they evaluated appearance, aroma, taste, aftertaste and overall impression. My wine scored enough points to win the Bronze Medal in its category. This is a great achievement as the wine was very young (less than six months old) and also it was my very first time submitting a wine to a wine-making competition.
Having won a Bronze Medal at the first attempt, I am now determined to make more wines and for this Bronze Medal to be the first of many!! It has also inspired us to experiment with the fantastic products we get from RJ Spagnols and to come up with our own special Wines Unlimited blends of white and red wines.
Earlier this year Lucas Zoratti joined our team of winemakers at Wines Unlimited. Lucas has just completed his Level 3 (Advanced) WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) course at Brock University. And with his knowledge of wines and grape varietals we are hoping to make some really special blended wine for our clients to enjoy in the coming months. Hopefully we will eventually have a new category of wine which will be the Wines Unlimited Collection!
In the meantime I have just checked and I have 20 bottles left of my award-winning Grenache Syrah Merlot which I am looking forward to sharing with friends, family and clients over the coming months (and I will certainly try to save 6 of them to see how they age as if they won a Bronze Medal at 6 months old then they are definitely going to improve with age!