American Wine Society National Conference 2018

To Buffalo, New York State, for the American Wine Society 51^st annual National Conference.

Flying into Buffalo. On left is Canada, right is USA, at bottom is Lake Erie. In middle is Grand Island. The two rivers merge at top of picture to plunge over Niagara Falls.

Buffalo is on the banks of Lake Erie a few miles from Niagara Falls. It’s the home of Buffalo Wings and the sliced beef filled kimmelweck roll ‘Beef on Weck’.

The venue was the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Buffalo ConventionCentre. 500 AWS members, plus exhibitors and presenters attended, the furthest travelled being two winemakers from Slovenia. Slovenian wines were one of the sponsors and the Slovenian ambassador  travelled up from New York City to give a witty speech to us over dinner while we tasted wines from his country.

On Friday 2 November I spoke about and presented five  South African Chenin Blancs. My session on Saturday 3 November was Pinotage. Thanks to the generosity of importers and distributors, I was able to show the following fine wines:

Backsberg Rosé 2018
Survivor 2016
Kanonkop Estate 2016
Simonsig ‘Redhill’ 2014
L’Avenir Estate Single Block 2015  

Details of the contributors, their wines and links to wine fact sheets are on the AWS 2018 tab at the top of this site.

This was one of the wines accompanying the Grand Banquet

 

and a perfect match for the delicious Filet Mignon

.