With the release of the Box Wine Award winners, what box will you be unwrapping this festive season…red or white?
The funky Box Wine Awards were organised by Spit or Swallow, the website where wineries are rated and reviewed by the public (and much more). It was a sold-out event with possibly more women than men donning moustaches for the Magnum Pi theme. Hawaiian shirts, eighties hairdos and contagious smiles were found all round and set the mood for the evening.
The feature that sets this wine competition apart from the rest (apart from the obvious, that is that all the wines entered are box wines!) is that only two wines are announced as winners at the end of the evening. One white wine and one red wine. This year Robertson Winery Sauvignon Blanc was awarded the best White Box Wine in South Africa and Drostdy-hof Merlot 2010 walked away with the title for best Red.
This was the second year of the awards and entries to this year’s competition increased from 14 wines last year to a staggering 39 this year. Over 80 Judges tasted through this year’s line-up with only one aim at hand, to find the best red and best white box wine in South Africa.Everyone who attended the event had the opportunity to judge the wines. The judging panel was a nice mix between esteemed wine critics and experts, everyday wine drinkers and members of the media.
What made this competition different from any wine competition in the world was the scoring system that was used. The popular social media website, Twitter, was used to record and calculate all the scores submitted on the evening. All 39 box wines were scored blindly out of 10. Everyone who attended the event’s twitter handles were registered and all that the judges had to do is tweet their scores @boxwineawards. This live method of scoring provided people from across South Africa and the world with the opportunity to follow the event online and see exactly which boxes were in the lead.
If you would like to see the full results for the awards click here.
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