By Jim Boyce | The past week has been memorable for Nova Cadamatre, winemaking director at Constellation’s Canandaigua Winery in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Just days after visiting China and winning a medal for her entry in the two-year Ningxia Winemakers Challenge (NWC) she has become a Master of Wine.
Cadamatre partnered with winery Lansai for the 48-candidate NWC and talked about her initial experiences in this 2016 interview. Last week, after returning home from Ningxia wine events in Yinchuan and Beijing, she wrote about the wine she made:
Going into the judging, I was happy with my wine. It reflected the challenging aspect of the competition but also was a testament to perseverance that was needed to adapt to the “challenge†aspects. These included a total language barrier, limited time (in my case) to attend to the wine, non-standard vineyard practices, as well as social and cultural isolation particularly during the first few weeks during harvest.
She also wrote about the joy of winning.
“They announced the silver medal winners first and I was surprised to hear Lansai called first!” she writes. “I was so excited to have won a medal for this even after all the hard work and dedication of both myself and the winery team.”
But two years of visits to China seems like vacation time compared to Cadamatre’s ten-year journey to become a Master of Wine. She has written many frank posts about the struggle to finish, from sitting her first MW exam in 2009 to her sixth attempt, in 2016, during which she passed both theory and tasting parts. She has written about what she changed to find success, about working on her final piece of the MW, the wine research paper, and about waiting to see if it was accepted.
You can see all of the posts about her MW journey here.
Cadamatre (second left) with fellow silver medalists of the Ningxia Winemakers Challenge.
Follow Grape Wall on Facebook and Twitter. Support the project here. And sign up for the China wine newsletter below. Also check out sibling sites Beijing Boyce and World Baijiu Day.
Grape Wall has no sponsors of advertisers: if you find the content and projects like World Marselan Day worthwhile, please help cover the costs via PayPal, WeChat or Alipay.
Sign up for the free Grape Wall newsletter here. Follow Grape Wall on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. And contact Grape Wall via grapewallofchina (at) gmail.com.