Redesigning our Trophy Structure
How and why we refined our Trophies for IEWA26
Wine competitions overcomplicate things. Too many categories, too many trophies, and too many reasons for producers to wonder whether the entry fees might have been better spent elsewhere.
From day one - sometime in late 2015 - my aim with The IEWA was to avoid that trap. If awards are going to justify their existence, they need to do two things well: deliver genuine value for producers, and offer something meaningful to consumers trying to choose a bottle of English wine.
And trophies sit somewhere near the centre of that balancing act.
Over the years, as IEWA entries have grown and styles have evolved, it’s become clear to me that trophy structure need just as much thought as judging process. So for this year, we’ve taken a step back and refined the IEWA trophy list - not to make it bigger or more impressive, but to make it more useful.
From a producer’s point of view, trophies need to earn their keep. Entering competitions costs money, bottles, and time, and the return should be more than a fleeting social media post. A trophy win should be something that can be explained quickly to a buyer, understood easily by a customer, and reused confidently across marketing, sales conversations and trade listings.
That’s why we’ve resisted the temptation to create lots of narrow or novelty trophies. They might look exciting on a results sheet, but outside the judging room they often create confusion rather than clarity.
Instead, we’ve focused on how English wine is actually made, sold and talked about.
Sparkling wine is still England’s calling card, so we will award Best Sparkling White and Best Sparkling Rosé - competitive, recognisable trophies that need very little explanation. Alongside them now sits Best Non-Traditional Sparkling, which is where innovation properly belongs. Pet-nats, alternative methods, unusual varieties and sparkling reds all live here, judged seriously but without forcing them into classical moulds they were never meant to fit.
For still wines, we’ve kept things deliberately simple. Best White, Best Rosé and Best Red reflect how most producers structure their ranges and how most consumers shop. Alongside these, Best Alternative / Experimental Still creates space for skin-contact wines, hybrids and boundary-pushing styles - wines that deserve to be judged on their own terms, not marked down for being different.
One area we’ve thought hard about is low-intervention winemaking. So many producers work thoughtfully and minimally in the cellar, and those wines are an incredibly important part of the English wine landscape. But turning ‘low intervention’ into a trophy is problematic. Nobody describes their wine as “high intervention”, and drawing hard lines rarely reflects reality. Instead, we ask producers to self-identify these wines on our entry form, allowing us to flight and judge them alongside comparable styles. That should improve fairness without turning philosophy into a prize.
Of course for consumers, all of this happens quietly in the background. The key message remains very simple: medal-winning English wine, independently judged, and well worth seeking out. And the trophies add depth and credibility for those who want it, without overloading the signpost.
Finally, the producer trophies allow us to recognise people as well as bottles. Artisan Producer of the Year celebrates small-scale, hands-on excellence of those who grow grapes and make the wine themselves. The Newcomer Producer Trophy shines a light on emerging producers finding their feet. And IEWA Producer of the Year rewards consistent quality across a body of work - which, in commercial terms, is often far more meaningful than a single standout wine.
None of this is about claiming a perfect system. It’s about making deliberate choices, asking whether each trophy genuinely adds value, and being willing to change things when it doesn’t.
If the IEWA is going to be useful - and ten years in, that feedback keeps coming in - then this is the kind of thinking it requires.
I can’t wait to see where these trophies end up. See you in May for IEWA26.
Alex Taylor
Founder, IEWA
‘Awards should evolve with the category - not freeze it in time’
