Decanter

Uh, also several of the... a couple of the wineries in Prince Edward County have received recognition and won medals on an international level.

Over the last number of years, uh, places, places like Stanna's Vineyard, Broken Stone Winery, Closson Chase, Rosehill Run, um, Trail Estate have won w- have won medals at the Decanter World Wine Awards.

Decanter is a wine magazine that has, that it comes out of the UK, and it looks at the world of wine.

And to g- to get medals in those awards is very good.

Mm-hmm.

And a lot of guys have won s- bronze and silver medals, and then this year, Trail Estate's, uh, V7 Chardonnay, which was a 2023 Chardonnay, won a go- a gold medal, and that was the first time a winery has won a gold medal at the, uh, Decanter World Wine Awards.

You have Norman Hardie Winery.

They don't really enter too many competitions, however, their, they sell a lot of their wines actually in, um, in Europe, and they have representation in 40 different Michelin star restaurants throughout Europe.

But on that note, I guess a, and a point I would add is if you're not tasting them right by the sea where they're being grown and made, then like anything in wine, there's also the imagination is involved and, and affect and emotion are involved whenever we're tasting a wine.

You can try to cancel it as much as possible, and sometimes that's easier to do than others if it's like a, a competition like, you know, the Decanter Wine Awards or something, or, or you really like want to do an analytical blind tasting.

But for most of us, like if you're just drinking and tasting wine for the fun of it and the pleasure of it, which, which is really the point most of the time, and you then in that case, you know a little bit about the wine that you're tasting.

You chose it for a particular reason or someone else chose it, and you're engaging with it with some knowledge, with some imagination of where it came from.

Yeah, sure.

I'm, I'm writing a lot.

I write mainly for, uh, these days for, for Jancis, for jancisrobinson.com, uh, for Decanter, for World of Fine Wines.

Uh, I also write for The Somme Journal in the US.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Uh, and then you guys, which surprised me, um, was the, they've rated the worldwide top 50 vineyards, um, that was I think Decanter who, who rated that.

Um, and you guys are inside that, uh, and I don't know, somewhere like 30 or something like that.

And then we've only got one from Australia, and that's Henschke over in Barossa Valley.

So maybe if I wrote to her, the worst she can say is get lost.

So I wrote to her and she was very generous and she told me to go and talk to Decanter because they needed somebody.

She'd never met.

What was the book? It was called The Wine Drinker's Handbook.

I was given a

similar sort of thing with the pocket wine book because I didn't know anything about wine.

And I was going to see these people at Decanter.

So I went into W.H. Smith and I bought a copy of this book and mugged it up, basically.

It was great, you know, lovely family, amazing wines.

And it was just as I started with them, they'd won a big award with Decanter.

Okay.

And they'd won, uh, you know, best, best sparkling wine in the world against champagnes and everything else.

She became a Master of Wine in 2006.

Today, among many other things, she's a contributing editor to Decanter Magazine, and her unwavering dedication to Spanish wine has been formally recognized at the highest level by Spanish government.

She chairs the Gran Orden de Caballeros del Vino, a highest level distinction.

Spain's ambassador to the UK awarded her the Officer's Cross of the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic.

She has mapped the journey of Spanish wine with exceptional depth count in her books.

The most recent one is, uh, The Wines of Central and Southern Spain, published in 2025, a book in which Jumilla features quite prominently and also a work that has been informed by years of traveling and researching across the region.

She has visited Jumilla, tasted Jumilla wines as a judge, and of course, written about them for Decanter.

So she's really someone who knows the territory from inside out.

There's a ball rolling

And what's next? And I think, you know, we're filming right now on a Sunday afternoon, and, uh, last week, last Wednesday, the Decanter Wine Awards just came out.

Yeah.

And those are huge wine awards in the world, and for folks who don't know, based out of London.

Very exciting.

I had a friend who called me.

She's, um, she's in the PR space out of California, and, uh, she called me last week, and she goes, "Amanda, I just saw Decanter," and she's like, "How many of those do you know, and who were represented at Austin Wine Week?" And I said, "All four of them."

They're all my buddies.