First and foremost I want to thank you for the opportunity to have you in Chile as part of our select group of judges that took part on the 7th Annual Wines of Chile Awards.

I sincerely appreciate your candid analysis of the competition, and I assure you it will catalyze some very interesting discussions within Wines of Chile. However, each of the elements that you pose were given careful consideration during the planning phase, and as you suggested, there was a logic to it all. Let me explain:

1) Having an all-Canadian judging panel: The AWoCA, as currently conceived, is as much a top level competition as a market intelligence exercise. All previous AWoCAs have always focused on a single market, and for the first 6 versions always alternated between judges from the UK and the US. This year we decided to focus on Canada for the first time, in recognition of its importance to the Chilean wine industry as the 3rd largest market for our wine and with the specific objective of developing tools and market knowledge to help us better serve the needs of the demanding Canadian market. This objective was largely achieved.

2) Entries for the competition capped at CAN$30: The reason for this was that the competition has a commercial objective as much as an educational one. We decided to focus the Awards on a price range where we feel Chile has the greatest potential for growth in terms of sales and market share. Having said that, we know it was equally important to expose the judges and your audience to the higher range of premium wines so you could all assess the potential for Chile in terms of high quality winemaking. That’s why we hosted a vertical tasting of premium wines and served several of the more premium-level wines during the different luncheons and dinners throughout the week. Also, the wineries you all visited showed their higher end wines. We know these superb wines did not go unnoticed and that although they were not part of the competition, they did help build a comprehensive image of Chile as a premium wine producer. We hope that that message will also be shared with your readers and students.

3) Finally, in Chile there is not much relationship between the number of hectares planted and the number of wineries. There are approximately 140 wineries that bottle and export wine, and only a subgroup of those export to Canada. Furthermore, not all of them have 6 different wines in the given price range. So when these factors are taken into consideration, the percentage of participating wines and wineries was really quite good. For example, if we suppose that the 100 or so wineries that export to Canada on a regular basis had all sent 6 wines, that would be 600 wines, so 460 isn’t far off at all! There is no pre-selection whatsoever done at Wines of Chile. Each winery is free to submit up to six wines of their choosing within the parameters of the competition.

I any case, I really appreciated your article, as it will absolutely help us design a better competition in the future.

It was a pleasure having you in Chile!

Kind regards,

Juan A. Somavia
Managing Director
Wines of Chile