The Hungarian team won this year's World Wine Recognition Championship held in Avignon, southern France, ahead of Belgium and Spain, the organizers announced on Saturday.
The Revue des vins de France, one of France's most important specialist magazines, organized the competition for the ninth time this year, in which teams from 27 countries participated.
Causing a great surprise, the Hungarian team - competitors Attila Aranyos, Levente Molnár, Laura Rabcsánszki and Didier Sánchez, as well as consultant Krisztina Palágyi - won, beating the tasters of the biggest wine nations behind them.
In the history of the Championnat du monde de dégustation, referred to as the world championship of wine recognition, the team from Hungary won for the first time, having finished in fifth place both last year and in 2018, in 12th place in 2019, and in 7th place in 2017.
Speaking to the French magazine, Attila Aranyos said that he himself was surprised by the success, "I knew we would be in the top five, but that we won the competition, I was the most surprised," he said.
"The Hungarians are a very experienced team that has been participating in the championships for a long time," Denis Saverot, editorial director of the Revue des Vins de France, told the French news agency AFP, adding that Hungary has many wine regions and that the sweet wine from Tokaj is the XIV. It was also served in the court of King Louis.
Tokai aszú in bottles/Source/Flavor/illustration
Each team at the World Championships consisted of four competitors and one consultant. In the first round, they had to blindly identify six wines, specifying the grape variety, the country, the vintage and the producer. The teams that advanced from the qualifiers had to continue the competition with another six wines. Six of the twelve wines were red and six were white.
The contestants taste completely blind, they cannot see the wine bottle, they cannot ask for external help, they can only talk to each other and decide together. Wines can come from any region of the world and any vintage, and can be made from any grape.
In this year's competition, the most difficult task proved to be the recognition of a wine made from the Garnacha grape variety from the Aragón region in northern Spain. This was only achieved by Luxembourg competitors. For example, identifying an Austrian white wine or a Jura white wine proved to be a much easier task.
The French team, which finished in first place the previous two years, was forced to sixth place this year.
Source: magyarhirlap.hu
Featured image: MTI
