Competitions

“Smart Testing and Fine Wine Investing” Competition

02 Aug, 2019

The Black Sea Region has a long and lasting winemaking tradition with more than 6 thousands years of history. The region is extremely rich in local grape varies, has a big number of chateaus producing high-quality wines for domestic consumption and export alike. It was only a matter of time when a company like Gustos.Life would focus on integrating the region into the global fine wine investment market.

An uniques event for the Black Sea Region

Obviously, the first step in wine investment is the professional and trustworthy evaluation of a big number of wine samples at the en-primeur stage and formalizing the process of choosing and rating the best wines worthy of investment. Unfortunately, all of the existing local Wine a Spirits competitions and other wine tasting events had no methodology nor experience in evaluating the wines at early stages of production and forecasting their future quality. This is why Gustos.Life decided to organize a new special one: “Smart Testing & Fine Wine Investing”.

Smart Testing and Fine Wine Investing Competition, Winerist

The competition took place on 29-31 of May the city of Odesa, Ukraine and was organized in partnership and using the designated spaces and equipment of the Laboratory of Sensory Analysis of Odesa National Academy of Food Technology (Ukraine) ) being part of OENOVITI network (https://www.oenoviti.com/) coordinated by the University of Bordeaux.

The transparency of the evaluation activities was assured by the blockchain based Gustos.Life software, while the credibility of scores and aging potential prognoses was guaranteed by an international jury of 15 WSET experts. The tasting process itself was streamed live together with the real-time log of blockchain records:

Augmenting the standards

Smart Testing and Fine Wine Investing Competition, Winerist

All the wines featured in the event were “blind tasted” and evaluated using the 100 points scale and the methodology of International Organization of Vine and Wine (O.I.V.), with some extra extents of scoring parameters for aging potential. The experts took into consideration the inevitable changes that the wine suffers in time (alcohol and tannins level, the acidity, aroma intensity, descriptors variety, limpidity, color and so on), decide on the current sample maturity and in case of an aging potential – forecast the years of its top quality.

Participants and Winners

Smart Testing and Fine Wine Investing Competition, Winerist

During the pilot version of the “Smart Testing and Fine Wine Investing” competition were evaluated 55 wines submitted by 16 winemakers from Ukranian and Republic of Moldova. Traditionally, 90% of the samples were Still dry wines.

The main aim of the “Smart Testing & Fine Wine Investing” was the investment potential, the wines scoring higher than a certain point became the subject of investment negotiations.

The absolute leaders between the en-primeur wines became Cabernet Sauvignon (2018) produced by Mezalimpe (Moldova) and Echinoctius (2017) produced by Equinox (Moldova).

Nearest future prospectives

The success of the pilot edition of the “Smart Testing and Fine wine investing” was proved by its immediate results – in a few weeks, the first Moldovian wines will become a subject of investment. As more and more winemakers are interested in the opportunity to trade wine at early stages by traditional fine wine investment model, the next 2019 edition of the event will feature a much bigger number of wine samples from at least 4 countries of the Black Sea Region.

This event organized by Gustos.Life will become a milestone point for the winemaking industry of the whole region, as the local wines are currently highly underestimated and have an extremely attractive quality to price ratio that makes them a valuable investment asset for local and international wine investors alike.

The integration into the fine wine investment processes will benefit many local winemakers and solve their cash flow problems, granting the possibility of continuous improvements of terroir and production technologies which will result in better and better wines, bringing joy and satisfaction for true wine lovers all over the world.

Did we intrigue you to explore more about Moldovan wines with this article? Then we recommend you reading about our top 10 Moldovan wines and the best wineries to visit in Moldova!

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