The Vila Viniteca Pair Tasting Award returns this Sunday to the Casa Llotja de Mar

Quim Vila and Siscu Martí, owners of the distributor Vila Viniteca, have managed to consolidate among the most important in the world the Couples Wine Tasting Award that they organize every year alternately in Barcelona and Madrid. The strong interest that this extremely difficult blind tasting arouses among professionals and enthusiasts of the wine world is demonstrated every January, when registration opens to participate in the competition. This year, another record was broken, as all places sold out in just three minutes.

This Sunday, March 3, the award will celebrate its sixteenth edition at the Casa Llotja de Mar in Barcelona, with the participation of 240 tasters from ten different nationalities, grouped into 120 couples who have been preparing for months. Many invest significant sums of money to buy wines from wine regions around the world to taste them and fix in their minds a memory of that origin, hoping to be able to identify it if it is one of the wines that will be served throughout the competition.

Specifically, in the qualifying phase, tasters must face seven wines, all served in the same type of Riedel glass and without prior decantation. They can be white, red, sparkling, or sweet wines, but all are of exceptional quality and selected directly by Quim Vila, who has created an effective custody system that guarantees the identity of the wines remains secret until the end.

During the tasting, contestants must discover the country of origin of each wine (1 point), the area of origin (1 point), the Denomination of Origin (2 points), the grape varieties (3 points), the vintage (3 points), the producing winery (3 points), and the brand (2 points). A tasting note can also be submitted to the jury, which will be evaluated in case of a tie.

Of the 120 couples participating in the initial phase, only the ten who obtain the most points advance to the grand final, where they will have to face seven more wines. For example, in last year's edition they had to discover that the sparkling wine was a 2013 champagne, that the whites came from the Costa d'Amalfi and Rías Baixas, and that among the reds there was one from the Argentine region of Mendoza, another from Castilla y León, and a third that was the iconic Hermitage La Chapelle, from the Rhône Valley. The sweet wine chosen was a Grenache from Empordà, from the Martí Fabra winery.

The Vila Viniteca Pair Tasting Award, in addition to presenting a very high level of difficulty, is also the best endowed in the sector, as a total of 40,000 euros are distributed. Specifically, the winning pair takes 30,000 euros, the second-place pair 7,000 euros, and the third-place pair 3,000 euros. Only one pair has been able to win the competition twice throughout its sixteen editions. These are Luis Gutiérrez ---Robert Parker's taster in Spain--- and Ignacio Villalgordo, who won the second and tenth editions. Last year, the winners were Nacho Martínez, from Decántalo, a Basque living in Barcelona, and the Tarragona-born oenologist Eloi Cedo.

During the competition, which is held before a notary, 2,400 glasses are used and around 300 bottles are consumed. The jury is made up of various professionals from the wine world, such as winemaker Xandra Falcó; the president of the Spanish Union of Tasters, Fernando Gurucharri; the critic José Peñín; the president of the Union of Spanish Sommeliers Associations, Juan Muñoz; and the owner of Euroselecció, the Riedel distribution company, Jordi Segura. This year, the artist chosen to design the award poster has been José Antonio Roda.

In parallel to the competition, in the same Casa Llotja de Mar, Vila Viniteca also organizes this Sunday a showroom with wines from more than 40 wineries that any wine enthusiast can enjoy, by paying 30 euros in advance. This ticket also grants access as an audience to the room where the competition is held and, at noon, allows one to enjoy a cheese buffet selected by Ardai, one of Vila Viniteca's companies. The Barcelona group, founded in El Born in 1932, exclusively represents more than 350 wineries and has 10,500 references in its warehouses, including wines and spirits. It also markets more than 400 cheeses and other gourmet products.