特别专题 (刊于深圳酒典杂志2008年7月刊)

奥林匹克酒竞赛

文/阿KEN  译/Lois

当世界的眼睛都聚集奥运会时，我突然想到，若是葡萄酒世界也来那么一场奥林匹克竞赛，那该多好！

葡萄酒界从业人员、协会和葡萄酒爱好者都十分关注国内或国际性的各式酒展，但是，这些酒展都只是针对参展商来推广的。除了某些特别的政治因素，一般来说这些商业活动都对国内外的协会公开招商，自由参加。

这些参展的酒品从来不会以种类、价格、质量等因素来预先淘汰后挑选出来参展，尽量也有一些场合，比如酒展的组织者可以通过小范围评选出最佳的100款酒，但参评的每一款酒都通常需要支付对应的费用才可以。与奥林匹克不一样的是，这些活动都没有一系列公平的程序先行淘汰掉不及格的产品，从中挑选优质产品广来告知后再来竞赛。

出于个人爱好，我也会参加香港一些小型的私人品尝会，并且在每次的品尝会上找出当场最佳酒品。这种私人聚会很简单，即每次会指定特定主题，然后每个参与者都携带一瓶符合该主题的酒，比如说上次，我们带的是售价在300港币以下或者1999年份的葡萄酒。我把这种活动称之为“一次私人的葡萄酒奥林匹克”。

然而，如果很大型的葡萄酒爱好者的团体或者商业协会来组织类似的活动，一个大型的葡萄酒奥林匹克竞赛岂非就完成了吗？

我认识到一些国家生产烈酒多于葡萄酒，比如俄罗斯的伏特加，苏格兰的威士忌等等，所以也许可以简单地把“葡萄酒奥林匹克”称为“葡萄酒及烈酒奥林匹克”就可以了，因为我一直相信酒界无局限。你意下如何？

Wine & Spirit Olympic

BY Kenneth Lo

While people in the world are taking about the forthcoming Olympic in Beijing, I suddenly have a strange idea about how a Wine Olympic would be!

Wine lovers and associates in the industry are paying close attention to various international and/or domestic wine shows every year. However, all these wine shows were aimed at promoting products from the participating exhibitors. And such kind of commercial activity is offering free opportunity to foreign and domestic associates on open-card basis, besides some special political reasons.

Products had never been pre-assessed by means of class, price segment, quality, etc. And even the wine show organizer is occasionally hosting some special events like selecting the top 100 wines through the small group’s nomination among professional wine masters and sommeliers or else, yet the individual participating wine was simply offered at the discretion of the participating supplier who had agreed to pay the requested fee for financing the event. Unlike Olympic, there has never been a serious and fair procedure of eliminating the inferior ones and selecting the qualified ones prior to the authentic game which will be broadcasted to the whole world to show who the winners are.

Due to my personal curiosity, I have been attending occasional small private wine tasting events in Hong Kong to find out which wine would be the best of the best in every event.  Such individual gathering is so simple as it only requires every time each attendant to bring a bottle of wine matching the theme of a particular topic, say this time we need to taste any wine at the vintage of 1999 or below HKD300 with proof of cost. I may call it a private Wine Olympic.

However, if some kind of bigger scale wine lover group or wine business association turns out to run such kind of significant function, a larger Wine Olympic can then be formed and so on.

I realize that some countries are restricted to produce spirits other than wine, such as Vodka from Russia, Whisky from Scotland, etc. Then we may simply turn the Wine Olympic into Wine & Spirit Olympic as I always believe that THE WORLD OF WINE (NOW EXTENDED TO SPIRITS) IS UNLIMITED. Don’t you think so?