SA producers are faced with a difficult choice when it comes to getting stickers onto bottles and as any retailer worth her salt will confirm, stickers shift stock. Mainstream competitions like Veritas and Michelangelo come round once a year and are expensive to enter, even if they cannot afford to pay tasters or even cover their transport costs. What happens to all the loot?

If you’ve bottled under cork, forget the Old Mutual Trophy Show which is something of a magnet for TCA. Classic Wine magazine is backed up with unpublished tasting results to such an extent that when winners are eventually announced, the wine is invariably sold out. Producer organized events like the recent Sauvignon Blanc Interest Group FNB Top Ten and the Standard Bank Chenin Blanc Challenge invariably get the “wrong result” and also take an age between tasting and announcement and cost sponsors a fortune flying in UK “judges” and paying for the slap up feeds at which winemakers and the “media” while away their days. Is this really the best use of sponsorship cash?

Which leaves our weekly RECM Best Value tastings. There is no entry fee, just the reasonable requirement of two bottles of wine and the results appear on the interwebs before 5pm on the day of the tasting. Open bottles and the spares are available for tasting by the public from 5-7pm, which is what the whole farrago should be about: getting the wine into the glasses of the public. The category for today is rosé, so do come along to the Taj Hotel this afternoon for la vie en rose.

Winnie Bowman (above) who tastes for Veritas, Platter, Wine of the Month Club and various other panels heads the tasting so there is no funny business or stylistic agendas to be pushed. Wines are tasted scrupulously blind and there are no winemakers on the panel, picking their own bevvies. By focusing on value for money – which does not necessarily mean cheap wine – we end up with a sensible selection.