Today, I’m closing the loop and following up on the contest to find the next German Wine Queen, who was officially crowned last week in a final gala event featuring the six finalists culled from Germany’s 13 wine regions.  The winner was Sonja Christchurch from the Mosel, who is a recent business graduate and has a day job as a wine journalist (right on!).

It’s interesting to see what the Wine Queen contestants have to go through to get into the finals and then be chosen for the top 3 slots, which includes the following tests:

• A blind tasting
• Describing a wine region (presumably a German one) within 45 seconds (which can’t be easy using long German words that probably take 15 seconds each to pronounce)
• Identify six errors in a film about the Middle Rhine region (this one is my personal fave)
• Stand up to an 80-member jury of wine experts, politicians and journalists

80-member jury?  Are you kidding me?  Masters of Wine candidates don’t need to do something that difficult, for Pete’s sake…

Anyway, you can check out a (very roughly translated) summary of the event here.

Congrats to the Mosel, and to the new Queen.  I may start a petition soon to implement the Wine Queen program in the U.S.  In my spare time.

Cheers!