“A rose is a rose is a rose” is the most famous quote of Gertrude Stein according to Wikipedia. She made that immortal botanical point in 1913 in a poem Sacred Emily. Nearly a century later, the Guala Closure Chenin Challenge has disproved Gertie as one Chenin Blanc from Kleine Zalze has at least three manifestations corresponding to different bottlings, one of which won the Guala Golden Goblet. Full marks to Tim James at Grape for highlighting this anomaly and Uncorked can only play catch-up and add that a friend bought a bottle from Kleine Zalze today with an analysis different to both the Chenin Challenge winner and first bottling, whose analysis on the internet caused all the confusion.
Gertrude Stein
None-pedants may look away now, but today’s Chenin has a residual sugar of 5.2 g/l versus the Challenge winner’s 7.3 g/l so it’s drier, less acidic with Total Acid of 6.24 versus 6.9, pH of 3.48 versus 3.19 (translating to a less “mineral” flavour) but even more alcoholic at 15.3% versus the winner’s 15.18% which makes the 14.5% (corresponding to the first bottling) on the label look silly as the law permits a 0.5% variance. Of course sponsor Guala would argue that since the winner was bottled under cork, natural variation would change the taste between the winner and today’s bottle, anyway.
[PS. The owner of today’s bottle comments “I’m happy to accept that the analysis variances are due to different testing equipment, i.e. that the wine entered for the Chenin Challenge corresponds with the analysis given in WINE Magazine (yes, even the RS and the PH can be explained as normal testing variances in my opinion).”] So perhaps there are just two roses in the garden. Or three.
If the purpose of all these many competitions is to inform consumers, the only fair way to level the playing fields without moving the goalposts is for competition organizers and producers of wine guides to buy their bottles from random retailers like Elzaan and Sipho Public do. As the cost of doing so may interfere with repayments on the publisher’s Jag, perhaps producers could undertake to replenish the retailer’s stock in the same way they would if a punter returned a faulty bottle. So there would be no cost implication for the competition circus and consumers will have the confidence that the bottle they buy has as much chance of being a winner as the panel that rated it.
