The world’s most prestigious sparkling wine competition, The Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships 2018 (CSWWC) have announced a total of 116 Gold and 128 Silver medals were awarded in this year’s competition to 18 different countries.

All the Gold & Silver medal winners can be found at the link below https://www.champagnesparklingwwc.co.uk/results/results-2018/

France gained the largest haul of Gold medals with 47 Golds and 36 Silver, closely followed by Italy who romped home with a collective total of 71 Gold and Silver medals with Franciacorta and Trentodoc the two regions coming out on top.

The judges were also particularly impressed by the quality of Australian, USA and English entries this year who brought home consecutively, ten, five and nine Golds.

The judges all commented that this has been the toughest judging yet as the quality and diversity of sparkling wine improves year on year.

Tom Stevenson, founder and chairman of the judges, said with increasing technology and expertise, world class sparkling can now be found in countries where It was undrinkable or non-existent a decade ago.

“While France and Italy remain the two most important countries in terms of their number of entries, the increase in entries from the USA, UK, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Hungary and South Africa has averaged in excess of 75%.

“In the USA we saw first time entries from Virginia and Illinois,” he added.

The judges were also thrilled to award Gold medals to Argentina, Canada, Hungary, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain AND for the first time a Gold medal to Romania.

The Best in Class, National Champions and World Champions by Style will be revealed at this year’s CSWWC Awards Dinner at Merchant Taylor’s Hall in London on October 24.

“We have been really impressed by the standard of sparkling wines that have entered this year, the bar was set high from day one and the medal count reflects this,” Stevenson continued.

“[…] We judge wines conventionally as Gold, Silver, Bronze, Commended, No Award, Possibly Faulty and Definitely Faulty, but we award unconventionally only Gold and Silver medals because these are the truly outstanding wines; and we only judge in flights of different style for National trophies and different origin for World Champion trophies.

“With a Bronze from a classic sparkling wine appellation, it is easy for producers to submit a magnum the next year and almost guarantee a Silver or even a Gold because the difference in quality between a regular 75cl bottle and a magnum of effectively the same wine is truly that great,” Stevenson explained.

“However, when a Bronze is from a relatively obscure, unknown or untested region, they have virtually no local expertise to assist them, so it is important for those producers to understand that they could be on the verge of achieving a world class sparkling wine.

“We make the judges’ notes for such wines exclusively available to their producers on a confidential basis and recommend they use this feedback to fine-tune their improvements.

“The competition becomes a record of their progress and, hopefully, it will eventually lead to a Silver or Gold medal — there were 219 theoretical Bronze medal wines this year that can and should give them hope for the future.”