Winners are grinners

I'm absolutely stoked to announce that we won SEVEN medals at the Perth Royal Show fruit wine competition!!!!

We entered seven wines, and to pick up an award for every single thing we entered is absolutely insane. We were nervously hoping for perhaps one or two, but to get seven is incredible.

We collected:

Silver - Dragonfruit Wine (Sweet)
Silver - Jaboticaba Fortified
Bronze - Dragonfruit Wine (Dry)
Bronze - Pineapple Wine
Bronze - Starfruit Wine
Bronze - Plum Wine
Bronze - Limoncello Liqueur

To get a bronze, we needed to score 15.5 - 16.9 out of 20, a silver was 17 - 18.5, and a gold was 18.5 or higher. So, it was possible for multiple wines to be awarded a particular medal in each class (rather than in the olympics when there is just one gold, one silver and one bronze).

We are just so thrilled to know that we are on the right track and what we are producing is actually pretty good. It's been a huge motivation for us to keep pushing on, trying to improve with every batch and to go for gold in 2017.

To get the wines in on time, however, was a little more difficult than we were anticipating. We sent off our entries (two bottles of each) in two big boxes via a courier to family in Perth. The Royal Show Society is very strict with entries - if they aren't delivered between the particular hours on the nominated day, you simply miss out.

The day before the wine was due, it still hadn't arrived in Perth, and every person I spoke to at the courier company couldn't tell me where it was.

Eventually, at around midday on the due date I heard that the pallet with our boxes was at the depot in Kewdale. There was four hours to get it from Kewdale to the showgrounds otherwise it was all just a big, expensive waste of time. Luckily, Josh's dad was out and about and was able to collect it from the depot directly - after an infuriating hour watching the warehouse guys check each box (and each box again) they eventually found ours and Cooper was able to deliver them for us.

It was such a stressful 48 hours leading up to the delivery, that the next month waiting for the results to be released wasn't quite as bad. We checked the Royal Show website every day hoping that it had been updated. The day that it was, we were both so nervous to actually open the link and check the results!

Anyway - we are just so thrilled that despite all the chaos leading up to it (and despite not having ever made a fruit wine up until the start of the year!) we are just so chuffed to have a few awards and can't wait to proudly display our certificates on the cellar walls!