The World Goblet: The World Cup of Value Wines
While scanning the World Cup groups in order to plan our daytime drinking over the next month, Gut Check noticed that most of the great wine-producing nations are represented in the tournament field, including all of those with a reputation for crafting good, value-priced wines. Because Gut Check never saw a value we didn't like, we resolved to stage our own tournament to determine the 2010 World Goblet Champion.
We selected the top twelve wine value-producing nations and seeded them into three groups based on personal prejudice, bias, and, most critically, the ability for us to actually find a nation's wines on local shelves.
To view all 2010 World Goblet matches to date, click here...Next: The groups...
Group A:
Spain
Argentina
South Africa
Portugal
Group B:
Italy
France
New Zealand
Greece
Group C:
United States
Australia
Chile
Germany
Like its fútbol counterpart, we'll start with a group stage, with nations facing off against one other in each pool. We'll award three points for each win, one point for a draw. The three pool winners and the top second-place country will move on to the semifinals, the winners of those to the final.
To make it more interesting, each match will require a different wine from each country (if we can -- Greece may prove tough). That way we'll get to plumb the depth of value each country has to offer. We've set a top "value" price of $12 - if we have to exceed that to find enough examples, we'll impose a penalty in the scoring - this is a value wine competition after all. As always, we'll do our best to find the highest-quality examples we can.
Like the World Cup that inspired it, the World Goblet begins tomorrow.
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