In the second of our two-part article on the Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year, we shift our spotlight to the Errazuriz Wine Photographer of the Year. With judges including David Loftus, internationally renowned food photographer, and Magui Chadwick, Family Ambassador at Viña Errazuriz, the award was split into three categories: People, Places, and Produce. This year’s finalists will be exhibited at The Royal Photographic Society in Bristol from the 20th November until the 12th December.
Oscar Oliveras’ A Grape View, winner of ‘Produce’ and the competition as a whole, is a portrait of the harvest in Saussignac. The Semillon of south-western France is famous for its quality, but we seldom see the harvest from the perspective of the fruit. As the sun comes through the cascade of grapes, as the driver looks back over his shoulder, we are reminded of the comfort we can take in tradition, even in these least traditional of times.
What first seem a blur on the curved plastic vat is, on closer inspection, the funhouse mirror of Victor Pugatschew’s subject. Winner of the People Category, Pressing the Pinot Noir depicts a recurring scene in wine photography: grape-treading. What sets Pugatschew’s image apart is the strangeness of the reflection, warped and pressed and stomped on. This is an image where the winemaker, for one brief moment, becomes like the wine itself.
The most understated of the winning images was Lana Svitankova’s The Vanishing Craft, awarded first place in ‘Places’. Taken in a winery in Porto, it shows the rusting tools of the cellar, the mould on the walls, the labels curling with age, the dirt between the flagstones. It’s an image of what we might lose, what in some places we have already lost: the traditions of viticulture.
More than ten thousand photographs were submitted across the twenty-five categories of the Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year. Caroline Kenyon, Founder and Director of the Awards, described the entrants as “beautiful and informative… the thread of food [which] connects us all.” A sense of joy and tradition in the midst of a miserable, unprecedented global pandemic is what came to define the Errazuriz Wine Photographer of the Year in 2021. On this, the tenth anniversary of the awards, we offer our warmest congratulations to the winners and hope to raise a glass again next year.
