Decanter World Wine Awards 2009: Loire Day Two

Chris Kissack (the wine doctor) tasting with clinical precision

Another busy day's tasting at the Worx with an early start (9am) ensuring that we finished the remaining wines in good time. Today we had an encouraging line up of Sancerre and easily the largest entry of Loire reds in the five years that the Decanter World Wine Awards have been running. One of the features of this year has been the number of corked wines from the Loire – around 6.6% of the wine we tasted.

Nigel Wilkinson (RSJ Restaurant)

As reported yesterday entries to the Decanter World Wine Awards have passed the 10,000 wine mark – around 10,200. Apparently entries are up by 11% overall with the number of producers entering wines up by some 20% – all very encouraging in these recessionary times.

Wide range of tones in a flight of Loire rosés

Tomorrow all the the regional chairs will meet to judge the regional trophies to select the international trophy awards.

Sarah Ahmed with other tasters at the Worx in the background including Gérard Basset and Giles MacDonogh

There are a number of interesting contrasts with the other significant wine competition to be based in the UK – the International Wine Challenge (IWC) not least that the driving force of the team behind the Decanter awards are female, whilst it is male for the IWC.

See also story about DWWA 2009 on decanter.com