The Varsity Blind Wine Tasting Match is an annual competition in blind wine tasting between the blind tasting teams of the Oxford University Blind Wine Tasting Society and the Cambridge University Blind Wine Tasting Society which has run since 1953. It is sponsored by Champagne house Pol Roger and the current convenor is James Simpson, Master of Wine (MW).
The winning team wins a trip to Épernay, France, to visit the vineyards of Pol Roger and compete in an international tasting match against a French university, plus a bottle of vintage Pol Roger each. The taster with the highest individual score wins a magnum of Pol Roger's top cuvee, Sir Winston Churchill. The reserve taster with the higher score wins a subscription to Decanter Magazine. The losing team each wins a bottle of Non Vintage Pol Roger.
Read more about Varsity Blind Wine Tasting Match: Judges
Famous quotes containing the words blind, wine, tasting and/or match:
“So may I, blind fortune leading me,
Miss that which one unworthier may attain,
And die with grieving.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)
“What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives to Congress for, of late years?... All their speeches put together and boiled down ... do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown on the floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house,—that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)