Maltese Team Successfully Debuts at the World Championship of Blind Tasting

Malta has a team of competitive wine tasters that can challenge the best in the world. This is the verdict of the World Championship of blind tasting that took place in Margaux (France) and saw a Maltese team participating for the first time and scoring a very honourable 29th position in the world.

From left to right: William Rizzo, Marco Trucco, Pierre Finger, Aaron Rizzo and Andrea Fornuto.


The Malta Tasting Team, dubbed “The Wine Knights”, is composed of four tasters and a coach. The four members are: William Rizzo, candidate for the Master of Wine title and owner of Kontrada Wine Merchants, Marco Trucco, candidate for the WSET Diploma, Pierre Finger, wine professional from Gozo and Andrea Fornuto, winner of the Qualification event that took place earlier this year at Farsons Direct. The coach is Aaron Rizzo, DipWSET and lecturer of wine courses at the ITS.

The Championship, which is organised every year by the famous Revue du Vin de France, took place at the Chateau Dauzac and consisted in a blind tasting of 12 wines with the task of guessing grape variety, country, region, appellation and vintage.

Our team trained for many months with the support of some wine importers like Farsons Direct, Attard&Co and Charles Grech who offered wines for our sessions. The result is a first step in the right direction as it is incredibly tough to perform well on the first event. We are already planning for next year’s event and we know we can compete with the best. We’re happy to give Malta an opportunity to raise its reputation as a wine country.

In fact, the Malta team is sponsored by the Malta Tourism Authority and Aaron Rizzo, the coach, had a chance to talk about Maltese wines in front of the delegations coming from 40 countries, mostly composed of top sommeliers from the best restaurants in the world.

For next year the team is keen to sign a Maltese winery as a partner to organise a proper degustation at the 2025 event which will be held in the Jura.

Results for the first year are encouraging as we placed higher than the UK team and same as the France team. However we also realised that we missed some wines just because of inexperience with the range of wines which are selected for the lineup. Also some wines are hard to get in Malta. We prepared for a lot of unusual grapes to come up but they served several wines from well-known regions produced in a slightly unusual style.

The team clearly needs support for the next participation. We are open to Maltese winemakers, importers and retailers to join the Malta Tasting Team effort as partners. Bring wine to us, taste with us and challenge us! Every wine lover in Malta can follow us on our Facebook page and we’re planning to have some open sessions of practice open to everyone with an interest in blind tasting as we look forward to growing the community