Updated April 29: The results are in!
Good food and wine is a multisensory experience, as the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition reminds us. This year, the contest's 10th, drew more than 9,000 entries from photographers in 70 countries, including in the three categories of wine photography: produce, people and places. Yesterday afternoon at 3 p.m., musician and cheesemaker Alex James announced the winners in a broadcast on Facebook and YouTube, with £20,000 ($24,800) in prize money to go around.
Pink Lady is a brand and variety of apple, so for a sponsoring fruit partner in the vinous sector, the organizers brought on Chile's Viña Errázuriz for the Errázuriz Wine Photographer of the Year award. “We hope that people will see what an incredibly complex, fascinating and rich universe the winemaking world is,” Lynn Murray, marketing director at Hatch Mansfield, Viña Errázuriz's U.K. importer, told Unfiltered via email.
The awards ceremony had more than 1,400 views on YouTube alone. German photographer David Weimann claimed the top wine prize for his portrait of Meike and Dӧrte Näkel, two German Pinot Noir winemakers at Meyer-Näkel. Weimann won the "people" category as well. French photographer Patrick Desgraupes took first in the "produce" category, while Chicago-based Thomas Hyland won the "places" category for his shot of snow-covered vineyards at Castiglione Falletto in Piedmont.
"We believe that food is so much not just about survival, but about community, about love, about sociability and about celebration, and how much meaning all those values have at this time when people are in lockdown," awards director Caroline Kenyon said during the ceremony.
Photos courtesy of the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition
The awards are open to all, professional and amateur, and judged anonymously. This year's short-listers included Wine Spectator contributors like Jon Wyand and Mick Rock.
“I think international wine photography is so important nowadays that everything is communicated by pictures in social media,” Magui Chadwick, family ambassador for Viña Errázuriz and one of the judges, said on International Wine Photography Day last year. “It enables us to share experiences, amazing landscapes of the vineyards and also the beautiful handcrafted processes of viticulture and winemaking.” The winner will pocket £1,000 ($1,240), which should nicely cover a case worth of their favorite subject matter.—S.Z.
A Cité du Vin in Your Living Room: Bordeaux Museum Goes Digital with Podcasts During Shutdown
Bordeaux’s Cité du Vin remains closed under France’s COVID-19 lockdown. Its much-anticipated Drink with the Gods! exhibition of depictions of wine in mythology has sadly been postponed, with the museum making new arrangements for its loans of artwork. But it'll take much more than a pandemic to distance the French from their beloved wine culture so, like everyone else in the industry, the Cité is learning to creatively adapt. You can't go there, so they're bringing the wine world to you, and all you need is an Internet connection.
Via updates on its website, social media channels and Soundcloud page, the Cité is providing videos, picture galleries and podcasts both sober-minded and whimsical, from deep dives into global terroirs to a "vigneron siesta," in both French and English.
Because the French start them young (on wine education), the Cité is also hosting a drawing contest for budding lil artistes on its Facebook page. The challenge (and if you've seen the place, it sure is one): Draw the Cité du Vin. The deadline is April 30, and winners in each age category get Family Admission Packs for whenever the place is back up and running. If you're a less deft hand, or an adult, you can soon instead bid on an annual membership, some of which the museum has donated as lots for the upcoming Les Vins de Bordeaux Leur Disent Merci (“The Wines of Bordeaux Say Thank You”) COVID charity relief auction.—S.M.
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