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Wine, paintings and violins make perfect trio
Submitted by Among the vines on December 3, 2006 - 11:17.Lake Geneva Region :: Swiss News :: Business and Finance :: Favorite regional places :: Food and Drink :: Martigny, Valais, Switzerland
Nobilis has been awarding medals for Valais wines since 1998 and the newest group of medalists is an exciting collection, with bottles that finally show the efforts of 10 or so years of serious replanting and exploring how to best bottle native varieties.
The wines are exciting, but so was the awards ceremony Friday night in Martigny. Most of these events to cap competitions, and there are dozens a year around the world, drag on. How do you hand out 150 medals and not bore the crowd?
Vinea, which organizes Nobilis, found a good solution, which consisted of holding the event in the centre of an art exhibit, paintings by Edouard Vallet. Most of the paintings in the excellent exhibit at the Pierre Gianadda Museum in Martigny are from the painter's Valais period, about 1900-1920. They show the rich development of the artist, a member of the Swiss school that also includes Vallotan. The paintings evoke life in the Valais 100 years ago, but the humanity he captured makes the paintings timeless.
As we sat in the centre of the museum, able to gaze at length at the art, the sense grew that we were surrounded by a quiet group of villagers who knew exactly what the business of growing grapes and making wine was all about.
Son and father celebrating Nobilis "Grand Or" medal, November 2006
The evening was remarkably Swiss in its organization: the ceremony began with Mozart played by a student quartet from the Tibor Varga Conservatory in Sion. Shortly after 18:00 the rollcall of more than 150 medalists was begun, several speeches, each limited to two minutes, were given, and the quartet punctuated each set of winners (announced by grape variety categories) with a little more Mozart. By 19:30 everyone had moved upstairs to an elegant buffet where award-winning bottles of wine were set out.
These are winemakers who all know each other, and whose standards are very high. Not surprisingly, conversations in the milling crowd quickly turned to new methods, experiments, and the political backing these winemakers need to move their wine onto a larger world stage.
-EW
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Wine, paintings and violins make perfect trio
Nobilis has been awarding medals for Valais wines since 1998 and the newest group of medalists is an exciting collection, with bottles that finally show the efforts of 10 or so years of serious replanting and exploring how to best bottle native varieties.
The wines are exciting, but so was the awards ceremony Friday night in Martigny. Most of these events to cap competitions, and there are dozens a year around the world, drag on. How do you hand out 150 medals and not bore the crowd?
Vinea, which organizes Nobilis, found a good solution, which consisted of holding the event in the centre of an art exhibit, paintings by Edouard Vallet. Most of the paintings in the excellent exhibit at the Pierre Gianadda Museum in Martigny are from the painter's Valais period, about 1900-1920. They show the rich development of the artist, a member of the Swiss school that also includes Vallotan. The paintings evoke life in the Valais 100 years ago, but the humanity he captured makes the paintings timeless.
As we sat in the centre of the museum, able to gaze at length at the art, the sense grew that we were surrounded by a quiet group of villagers who knew exactly what the business of growing grapes and making wine was all about.
Son and father celebrating Nobilis "Grand Or" medal, November 2006
The evening was remarkably Swiss in its organization: the ceremony began with Mozart played by a student quartet from the Tibor Varga Conservatory in Sion. Shortly after 18:00 the rollcall of more than 150 medalists was begun, several speeches, each limited to two minutes, were given, and the quartet punctuated each set of winners (announced by grape variety categories) with a little more Mozart. By 19:30 everyone had moved upstairs to an elegant buffet where award-winning bottles of wine were set out.
These are winemakers who all know each other, and whose standards are very high. Not surprisingly, conversations in the milling crowd quickly turned to new methods, experiments, and the political backing these winemakers need to move their wine onto a larger world stage. -EW (continue reading)→