Officially Rather Good

Remember the bottles that never made it to us?

Back when the wine was still being finished in Southern France, Ray brought two bottles home in his suitcase from Aix-en-Provence, meant for us. Somewhere between the airport and our front door, they disappeared. We didn't think much more of it at the time; we were too busy waiting on an Arctic lorry and hoping for the best.

Turns out those two bottles didn't get lost at all. They went straight into the International Wine Challenge.

We only found out afterwards, and once we knew, there wasn't much we could do except wait, the same way we waited for everything else with this wine. The IWC is judged blind by Masters of Wine and top buyers from across the industry, so there's no charming your way into a good score. It's just the wine, on its own, in a glass, being properly interrogated.

Then results came in…

La Femme est Magique was awarded a Silver medal, with a score of 93 points.

The judges' notes described it as "pale salmon pink, with fresh watermelon and clean, crisp acidity, an elegant, moreish, easy drinking style". Which, if we're honest, is exactly the wine we set out to make that first Thursday morning with Ray and ten glasses on the table, minus the spittoon this time, we'd imagine.

We keep coming back to the timing of it all. The vineyard change, the tight deadline, tasting the finished wine ourselves only when it finally arrived. We'd genuinely wondered whether we'd built it up too much in our heads. Whether the sample we fell for months earlier was ever going to be matched.

Somewhere along the way, while we were still holding our breath, it was already being judged, and it was already doing rather well.

We're not going to pretend we weren't thrilled. There may have been a small scream. There may have been a second bottle opened to celebrate the first.

But mostly, it just feels like confirmation of something we already believed. We built this wine slowly, changed course more than once, and refused to compromise on how it tasted, right up until the very last minute. Having a room full of Masters of Wine agree with us, blind, with no idea whose bottle they were holding, means more than we expected it to.

Silver medal. 93 points. Officially, rather good.

Katie & Lucy