Vibrant Rioja Announces “Pour Genius” Winners

The five-month, nationwide search for the most knowledgeable bartender of Rioja wines in the US is over. The Vibrant Rioja campaign announced today that Charles Joly, chief mixologist at the Drawing Room in Chicago, IL, is the winner of its first-ever “Pour Genius” bartender competition. The Grand Prize is a five-day, all expenses paid visit to Rioja, Spain’s most famous wine region.

“In today’s bar business, consumers are looking for small plates and by-the-glass options instead of sitting down for a lengthy dinner,” explains Pablo Olay, Campaign Director for Vibrant Rioja. “Our competition was designed to educate bar staff about Rioja’s potential as by-the-glass offering, and test their knowledge about the region.” Each competitor had to create a Rioja-based drink, take a quiz and submit an essay on Rioja’s appeal at the bar.

More than forty industry professionals from key markets such as Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Las Vegas and Seattle participated in the contest. The second place went to Dylan Regan, bar manager at Jimmy’s in Aspen, Colorado, and Alexander Caban, a bartender at Junction in Santa Fe, New Mexico, came in third. Other serious contenders came from the Bellagio in Las Vegas, as well as the Clover Club and Red Rooster in New York. 

For more details about the competition, please click here.

* * *

As we all likely know, wine is a fermented alcoholic beverage. However, fermentation is not a man-made process. It has occurred naturally (and spontaneously) for a hell of a lot longer than Man has populated it. Ancient civilizations enjoyed the blessings of the simple process of grapes coming into contact with wild yeasts and turning into alcohol, and learned to easily control and tailor it to create better, larger volume wine for consumption.

Fermentation of grain into beer requires the grain to be malted to turn starches into sugar, and a complex distillation process was necessary to make spirits. People around the world had enjoyed wine for millennia by the time these were mastered! The fact that wine is such an ingrained part of various cultures does not necessarily make it the easiest thing in the world to understand. There may be no other beverage that is (or at least, can be) as complex, nuanced, or fussed over as wine. Have a surf through Amazon.com, search for “wine,” and you’ll see what we mean.

For the American bartender, wine can be pretty intimidating, if not downright terrifying, to the point where many simply ignore or have given up on learning about wine. We know a lot of bartenders who can espouse the virtues of basically every bourbon whiskey ever produced, or intimately know the recipes for hundreds of cocktails – but ask them something about Burgundy or Napa, and their eyes glaze over while their tongues swell out of their mouths.

For more: Rioja Bartender Guide