A UK wine merchant has claimed many talented wine producers are overlooked by professional buyers and has pledged to spend $100,000 on wine chosen by its customers at this year’s Wines of Argentina trade tasting.

Naked Wines will take fifty of the firm’s customers to the London event to taste 100 wines and shortlist 10.

Rowan Gormley, director of Naked Wines told decanter.com, ‘If the customers are prepared to pay more for the wine than the price set by the winemaker, that wine gets a big slice of the $100,000 order and vice versa.’

The scheme aims to give unknown producers, who lack the resources to break into the UK market, an opportunity to win a listing.

Gormley said, ‘We are going to focus on what’s inside the bottle. So much of what consumers pay for is fluff. They are paying for someone’s reputation. What we are trying to do is list wines that are based on people’s talent.’

50 wines have been submitted so far but Naked Wines hopes more wineries will participate.

Gormley has already listed six new Australian wines using this scheme and will also run the $100,000 initiative at London’s South Africa trade tasting in October.

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Rebecca Gibb MW
Rebecca Gibb MW
Decanter Magazine & DWWA Judge

Rebecca Gibb MW is a wine journalist and editor who has also founded Bamboozled games, ‘the world’s first wine and spirit puzzle makers’. Having spent six years living in New Zealand, she has recently returned to her native north-east England. While in New Zealand, she became a Master of Wine, graduating top of her class and winning the Madame Bollinger medal for excellence in tasting. A former winner of both the UK’s young wine writer of the year and the Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer, her first book The Wines of New Zealand was published in 2018. She also runs wine events and has her own consultancy business The Drinks Project. She was a judge at the 2019 Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA).