For the first time ever, the Malta Tasting Team, "The Wine Knights", will join the competition in 2024. It's an exciting opportunity for us to compete at the international level and to grow Malta's reputation as a wine country. 

Malta is a small, rocky and densely populated island with a hot Mediterranean climate. We have only approximately 500 hectares of vines, but the tradition of winemaking on the island dates back to the Phoenicians, almost 3 thousand years ago, making it one of the oldest wine making regions in the world. Malta wines are very hard to find abroad but very popular locally, and the wines produced from the two indigenous grapes Gellewza and Girgentina are one reason to come and visit the island (at least for wine geeks!). 

For sure, we'll bring some hard to find Maltese bottles to share at the World Tasting Championship.  But now let's introduce the team! 

The Malta Tasting Team is backed by the Malta Tourism Authority - Visit Malta and is composed of:

-William Rizzo, MW Candidate. Owner of Kontrada Merchants and fully determined to become the first Master of Wine from Malta.

-Marco Trucco, DipWSET Candidate and founder of the Tasting Team. Marco started the adventure!

-Pierre Finger, WSET Advanced from the beautiful island of Gozo.

-Andrea Fornuto, winner of the Malta Wine Tasting Qualification Events. 

The coach of the team is Aaron Rizzo DipWSET, wine educator and instructor of WSET courses in Malta at the Institute of Tourism Studies. 

Malta has a unique position and culture: a close proximity to Sicily and the rest of Italy combined with the historical ties with the United Kingdom. The result is that in Malta we have very eclectic and international wine lists, open-minded sommeliers and importers that in recent years have significantly raised the bar of wine availability in Malta. There are several merchants who support the Team, among which Farsons, Kontrada, Attard&co and Charles Grech. Some niche wines may be still hard to find on the island, but we feel quite privileged to have good access to the international wine trade, almost as if we were in London and to local Italian producers as if we were in Italy. A good combination! 
The WSET outpost in Malta is vital to wine education on the island: William, Marco and Pierre were all students of Aaron Rizzo's courses.   

Q: What's the goal of the team in terms of position in the competition?

A: Every successful training session we raise our ambitions and feel that we can do well, but as we're new to the competition, we need to remain very very humble.

Q:  What do you think is the main team bias?

A: We have a lot of Italian wine in Malta, so I think we tend to call Italy more often than we should. And, for some unknown reason, when we're really unsure about a bold red wine we all call it Touriga National! 

Q: What's your protocol?

A: We take 2 minutes to taste and decide our calls individually and 8 minutes to present it and discuss with the coach, who knows each taster's strength. We combine the expertise of our MW candidate in the team with the skills and the instinct of the other tasters. For example, Andrea is the Master of Vintages.

Q: Why the "Wine Knights?"
A:  "It sounds very serious and very goliardic at the same time, which represents us well."