Pigs are flying and vultures are circling around the Chenin Blanc Challenge

Hooray, hooray!! The pigs are flapping lazily past the treetops, Satan and all his little devils are practising their double axels on the ice and Neil Pendock is being nice to Tim James!! An exciting scandal is brewing yet again in the wine world, this time over the results of the Guala Closures Chenin Blanc Challenge and, with the normally opposing forces of Pendock and James weighing in together for once, one wonders where it will go?

The scandal is an interesting one – is the wine which won, the same as the wine you can actually buy on the shelves? The analysis of the three wines offered under the same label differs in terms of residual sugar and alcohol, in the case of the sugar by as much as 157%! A reply from the owner of Kleine Zalze , the winery in question, explains that there have been different bottlings of the same wine and the one which actually entered the Chenin Challenge made up only about 14% of the total production.


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