National Wine Awards of Canada

The WineAlign National Wine Awards of Canada (NWAC), the country’s largest competition of Canadian wines, is held annually in mid to late June. Each year, somewhere in Canadian wine country, co-founders Anthony Gismondi and David Lawrason assemble Canada’s leading wine writers, trade buyers and sommeliers to evaluate the current crop of 100 percent Canadian grown and made wines and ciders. This year marks the 20th Anniversary of these wine awards.

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

The judging of the 20th Anniversary Edition of the National Wine Awards of Canada has been postponed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sessions were to be held the week of June 24 to 28 in Penticton, British Columbia. Still, with so many moving parts, from processing entries and shipping wines to confirming hotel rooms and flights, the Judging Committee has made the difficult decision not to go ahead at this time. The intention is to meet again at the end of April to consider new dates late in 2020 or to skip a year and come back strong in 2021.

“The judging is not a public event, but spending five days with a group of over twenty judges and just as many backroom volunteers would not be safe,” said co-chief judge Anthony Gismondi. “We were anticipating about 1900 entries causing us to use, wash and re-use some 2000 glasses per day. That’s a lot of handling, and there is no way to do it safely with the current physical distancing measures in place.”

Please click here to read the full announcement.