And the winner is… gold, silver, bronze WOW 2019!

Events 9 December 2019 Italian Wine Chronicle

And the winner is… gold, silver, bronze WOW 2019!

WOW 2019 is a great confirmation. The second edition of Civiltà del bere’s wine competition based on tipicity selected 537 excellent and typical wines: the extremely high-level medal table reflects the best of Italy’s winemaking.

WOW – The Italian Wine Competition 2019 has repeated the success of its debut by raising the bar even further. The selection of award-winning wines is even more limited, although the quantity and quality of the champions taking part is wholly in line with the last edition. After three days of tasting, the judges awarded 56 golds (6.8%), 149 silvers (18.3%) and 332 bronzes (40.7%).

Discover all the award-winning wines

Tipicity = Taste + Terroir + Tradition

Selecting the best Italian wines with a strong identity: this is the idea that WOW was based on, when it began one year ago, on the model of great international competitions. Our experience of the first edition, the huge participation and curiosity of readers convinced us to delve further into the concept of typicity, creating the “3 Ts” reference system: Taste – Terroir – Tradition. These are the three declensions of the “T factor” that we recognize in the most typical wines. If taste refers to the flavour of the land of origin, such as sapidity of the sea in a great Vermentino di Gallura, terroir is the expressive summary of soil, microclimate and human know-how. Lastly, tradition is the distinctive reference to time-honoured knowledge, preserved or reinterpreted (like a red wine from Verona produced with the traditional grape-drying method).

The value of bronze medals

This year we wanted to attach more importance to the concept, at the cost of reducing the number of award-winning wines. In fact, to obtain a bronze medal, the minimum mark for typicity was raised from 5 to 6 tenths (it remains 5 tenths for silver and gold). The 2019 bronzes are wines that particularly correspond to the territory and its winemaking tradition.

A dedicated jury for sparkling wines

Another much-appreciated change in this edition concerns sparkling wines. The world of bottle-fermented wines continues to specialise further and garner success on the market: this is why we dedicated a whole section of our competition to the assessment of sparkling wines, entrusting it to a panel of 6 experts on the subject. But we haven’t overlooked other types of wine and have increased the number of judges from 15 to 25 in total. As always, the wines were blind-tasted, with some anonymous information indicated (origin, grapes, vintage, ageing, price and residual sugar for sparkling wines).