‘Wine Options’ is a competition where teams of four people combine knowledge, memory, ability to taste, and some inspired guesswork to determine the identity of eight wines. The game is generally credited (in this part of the world certainly) to the late Len Evans. The New Zealand competition takes place at First Glass Wines & Spirits in Takapuna. Owner Kingsley Wood has been running Options for many years – Sunday was the 43rd event. He thinks it is “probably the longest run of any Options anywhere and that event in 1991 at the Downtown Centre where 101 teams took part was almost certainly the largest single serious Options competition held anywhere in the world”.
Every wine is poured ‘blind’ – either from a jug or from a bottle hidden inside a bag. The set of questions for each wine begins with a fairly general question such as “is this from the Northern or Southern Hemisphere?’ From there, the questions will gradually become more precise, asking for a guess of the vintage (‘is it 2020 or younger, 2018-2019 or 2017 and older’) and finishing with a question with three options from which to pick the actual label. This year the wines ranged from Clearview Endeavour Chardonnay to Wild Earth Reserve ‘Earth & Sky’ Pinot Noir.
The person credited with the most names on the fairly large trophy is Gabor Sarecsky – he is the captain of the team that won both the 2023 competition, and now the 2024 event as well. I was asked to join the side to fill a vacancy for a competitor who was on an overseas trip. Our victory was a testament to persistence – coming from a lowly 10th place out of 14, before achieving two ‘perfect scores’ on the last two wines, and storming to the win. Thanks to the team of Gabor, Lee Findlay and Nigel Cottle for the teamwork required to pull it off. As my fifth form French teacher once wrote on my school report (about my translation skills) – “David veers from the inspired to the inept” – so the best I can say is that ‘my contribution was to a team effort’.
