We’ve been totting up all the awards we’ve won over the previous ten years since we started entering wine competitions back in 2006. The Orion has won an award in the UK Vineyards Association (UKVA) contest nearly every year, making a grand total of nine awards, mostly silver. Only the 2012 vintage didn’t get an award – because we were away the summer it would have been entered.
We don’t enter all the wines for awards each year. It’s not cheap to take part, and it’s not worth it if we only have a limited number of that vintage to sell. You’ll never see a bottle of our Rose with an award, for example, simply because we only produce 800 bottles or so each year, which quickly sell out.
There are three competitions to consider. The first is the regional Wessex Vineyards Association in the winter, followed by the national UKVA and international Decanter awards competitions in the summer. The Wessex competition with its five international standard judges provides us with an initial quality check, and an idea of which wines to put forward to the next two competitions. We almost always enter at least one wine in the UKVA competition, and have just started taking part in the highly competitive Decanter awards, winning a silver medal for the Orion 2013
This year we have high hopes for the Madeleine Angevine 2014, which won a silver award in the Wessex competition, doing better than the Orion 2015 with a bronze. We’ll be putting both wines forward for the UKVA competition as well as the Decanter award scheme, when they’ll also both have matured further.