IWSC president elect: Neil McGuigan

As three-time IWSC Winemaker of the Year, who better than Australian Vintage CEO Neil McGuigan to step into the role of President for 2015.

What does it mean to you to take on the role of IWSC President?

Firstly, it’s a great honour for Australia. It’s a great honour for the McGuigan brand and of course, for me personally. There have only been three other Australians before me to hold this position: Dr Max Lake, Chris Hancock and finally, Wolf Blass.

It’s a very prestigious role, one which I am humbled to fulfil – I will be an ambassador for wine globally as well as for the IWSC – arguably the world’s most prestigious wine show. That’s quite an honour for a guy from the Hunter Valley.

How do you believe you can use your industry experience to support and strengthen the IWSC?

There are a number of countries around the world that have not embraced wine shows. Wine shows are about lifting the quality of the “breed”. The IWSC is all about recognising quality, eliminating wine faults and embracing new wine styles, all while celebrating excellence across the global industry.
Wine shows are incredibly important to the consumer, as they instil confidence in the wine’s quality. As the IWSC is one of the best-judged wine shows in the world, any wine with an IWSC medal is greeted very favourably by the consumer.

On my travels around the globe, I will be encouraging more wine companies to become involved in shows such as the IWSC to ensure we are always raising the bar as an industry.

As someone who has enjoyed a lot of success in wine competitions, especially the IWSC, how valuable has this been to your business?

Winning at the IWSC has been crucial for our business; performing well in wine shows, and having awarded wines on the shelves for consumers is very important.

Wine show awards give consumers confidence and continued wine show success enhances your company’s credibility and reputation to the retailer, supermarket and restaurant gatekeepers.

There’s a well-established competition circuit in Australia – how influential is this on the country’s wine styles? And are domestic trends in tune with international consumer preferences?

Excellence is always awarded in both domestic and international wine shows. However, international wine shows and judges are looking for the more classic styles. With white wine, we generally see the highly awarded wines having slightly more generosity of fruit weight, and with red wines, savoury characters on the palate rather than just fruit bombs.

So yes, the styles that are awarded internationally are normally different to those that get the big awards at the domestic level.
The international wine shows influence our styles more than the domestic shows; this is because we are a global producer and we see that the judges at the IWSC are in step with the global consumer.

What sort of developments can we expect to see next from Australian Vintage?

We’re always doing exciting things at McGuigan; we are releasing some new varieties and wine styles next year. While I’m not going to go into the specifics, I am very positive about the continued increase in quality and innovation that our company is driving. We are continuing to plant new and exciting varieties in our vineyards; in fact, we are embarking on a program of an internal and external vineyard review to ensure we maximise quality aspirations at all of our vineyard sites. This programme will take probably three to five years, but we are committed as a company to continually increase the quality and innovation bar for the Australian wine industry.