THE FUSE

The twenty fifth anniversary of the Trophy Wine Show provides an opportunity to marvel at the distance our winemakers have traversed in the blink of an eye: a quarter of a century is both an instant, and also a meaningful chunk of time. It’s what separates the start of the First World War from the opening salvos of the Second, a brief moment, yet jam-packed with more mayhem and greater innovation than any comparable era of human history. Within this brief span there was the Great War, the Russian Revolution, the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the creation of innumerable new countries (and the obliteration of many others), the re-drawn map of the Middle East along lines which bequeathed upon us the conflicts of today, the rise of Japan as a world power, the Great Depression, the publication of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, the invention of television, jet engines, rockets, antibiotics. The list is endless.