Difficult questions

In a close contest, points won or lost through the way a Champagne cork is presented to the judges or knowing the correct region, and/or name or price of a Chinese Baijiu can be crucially important. Small service details matter. Failure to mention that the Dom Perignon is a Champagne from France leads to a lost point, even though one might imagine the information to be superfluous to anyone ordering that particular product.

Identifying two white wines as Rieslings and identifying which was from Germany and which from Austria was tricky enough, but spotting that the following pair were Semillons from South Africa and Brazil was far harder.

All three finalists proved capable of recognising that a pair of anonymous reds were of high quality and from Bordeaux but, perhaps unsurprisingly, none imagined that they were two vintages of Château Petrus. As a previous winner acknowledged later, “we see lots of top wines, but even we rarely see Petrus and certainly not across many different years.”

The judges – all former winners of the title – also clearly had their own idea of the kind of service they would reward with the highest marks. One semi-finalist, for example, was penalised for not treating the judges with sufficient respect. The candidate’s chattier approach might have played better in a top restaurant in Sydney or Las Vegas than with the mostly European judges in Paris.

Across all these criteria, Tomsons who had already won the European title, appeared  rarely to put a foot wrong, but from his viewpoint on the stage, Joseph admitted that, for most of the contest, he thought the Latvian and Dane were neck and neck, with Reeze coming in at a close third.
 

Meilleur Sommelier du Monde

Since its launch in 1969, The Meilleur Sommelier du Monde competition has become an event that genuinely deserves the overused adjective: unique. Which other professions - outside sports and the arts - can attract thousands of spectators who are ready to watch a hard-fought contest between participants from across the globe?

The fact that it only takes place every three years also sets this event apart, making more like the Olympics, for example than an annual event such as the Tour de France or a marathon. For a candidate to win at their fourth attempt, as Gerard Basset famously did represents a phenomenally long period of focused effort.

A watershed moment came in 1989 when Sinya Tasaki won for Japan at a time when the Japanese wine market was beginning to boom. His victory spawned an explosion of interest in wine service included the creation of a somm hero in a popular manga comic.

Since then candidates from a growing number of countries have triumphed, though none has so far lifted the prize for the US, and of course a woman has yet to win.

The Semi-Finalists (in order of success)

4   Pascaline Lepeltier, France
5   Wataru Iwata, Japan
6   Valeria Gamper, Argentina
7   Jo Wessels, South Africa
8   Andrea Martinisi, New Zealand
9   Suvad Zlatic, Austria
10 Sotiris Neophytidis, Cyprus
11 Tom Ieven, Belgium
12 Réza Nahaboo, Switzerland
13 Kai-Wen Lu, Taiwan
14 Manuel Schembri, Iceland
15 Mark Guillaudeu, USA
16 Francesco Marzola, Norway
17 Chuan Ann Tan, Malaysia