The Six Seed

The easiest wine of the Clare Cup was poured first: a 2025 Clare Valley Riesling, served blind in the middle of the valley that grew it. Six of the seven palates on the floor went five-for-five on it — hemisphere, country, region, grape, vintage, clean sweep. The seventh put it in New Zealand and called the grape Fiano.

The seventh won the cup.

The Cut

A Regional Cup runs three rounds. Round 1 is the options game — five wines, five calls each, a point per correct call, twenty-five on offer. It sets the seeds for everything that follows.

Sam Cooney ran away with it: 16 of 25, top seed, the only player to crack fifteen. Behind him a three-way logjam at 14 — Ben Marx, Claire H. and M. Corbett — filled seeds two through four. Then came the tie at 13: Mike Walters and Roberta Ruotolo, split by countback into seeds five and six. Simone C. took the last chair at 12.

Look closer at Roberta's 13, though, and the shape of it is strange. She dropped points on the sighter — the hometown Riesling everyone else aced — then posted a joint-best 4 of 5 on the hardest wine of the day, a 2020 Mosel Riesling that sent most of the room to France. She was one of only three palates to find the Mosel at all, and she read the New Zealand cabernet blend's grapes and vintage that most of the field mangled. She wasn't guessing badly. She was calibrated for exactly the wrong wine — and exactly the right ones.

The Blackout

Round 3 is played in black glasses — no colour, no clues, one wine, head to head. This is where seeds are supposed to matter.

They didn't. Roberta opened by knocking out Claire H., the three seed. In the semi she met Ben Marx, the two seed, and ended his day. On the other side of the bracket, Mike Walters — her countback twin at 13 — did her the favour of eliminating top seed Sam Cooney.

So the final was five versus six, the two players the cut had nearly sent home early. Roberta won it.

What It's Worth

The ledger reads like a box score: 15 points for playing, 13 banked in Round 1, 100 for the win. That's 128, and the top of the league ladder — twenty clear of Walters, who banked 80 for second.

But the number that matters isn't on the ladder. Winning a cup earns a Free Run: a locked seat at the Grand Final on 5 December — twenty-four chairs, $5,000 on the table. Everyone else in South Australia spends the rest of the season earning their way in. Roberta's already there.

That's the thing about a knockout format scored on perception: the seeding measures one afternoon's calibration, not a palate's ceiling. On 11 July the ceiling belonged to the six seed.

Next stop: the Adelaide Hills Cup, 22 August. The variety is Chardonnay. The moral of Clare is that nobody's safe — least of all the favourites.