WineHunter Award 2026: four recognitions for Minnelea
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The results of the WineHunter Award 2026 came in today. Minnelea received four recognitions: two Gold Awards and two Rosso Awards. Two sweet products and two savoury ones.
What the WineHunter Award is
The WineHunter Award is the selection that precedes and accompanies the Merano Wine Festival, the South Tyrolean event that for over thirty years has brought together wines and food products chosen one by one. It is not a fair you simply sign up for: samples are tasted by a technical panel and only those above the evaluation threshold receive the seal. The Gold Award marks the highest scores, the Rosso Award the products that still make the selection.
For a small workshop like ours one thing matters most: the judgement comes from tasting the product. Not from the story built around it, not from the label, not from how big you are.
The four products awarded in 2026
Gold Award
Rosso Award
Two sweet, two savoury: the interesting part
The number itself says little. What matters is where these four jars come from. A tomato sauce and eggplant preserved in oil have nothing in common with a citrus marmalade or an apricot jam: different raw materials, different seasons, different cooking times, even different areas of the workshop.
The only thing they share is how they are made. If the recognition had come only on the jams, you could put it down to one particularly good recipe. Coming on four products that sit at opposite ends of the range, it says something different: what holds is the method, not the single label.
The Minnelea Method, in practice
There is no industrial secret behind it. There are three choices, kept even when they cost more.
- Fruit and vegetables picked at the right moment. We harvest when the fruit is genuinely ripe and process it quickly. That is why some references are only available in certain months of the year.
- Vacuum cooking at low temperature. Without air, water evaporates below one hundred degrees: the fruit is not "burnt" by boiling, and colour, aroma and flavour stay much closer to the raw material we started from.
- No preservatives, no thickeners, no added pectin. Texture comes from the fruit and from cooking time. The same applies to the vegetables in oil and to the sauces: what is inside is what the label says.
It is a way of working that does not allow large volumes. We produce small batches, jar by jar.
From 2024 to 2026
This is not the first time the WineHunter has looked at our products. In the 2024 edition came three Gold Awards (Extra Fig Jam, Lemon Marmalade, Sun-Dried Tomato Paté) and two Rosso Awards (Extra Black Blueberry Jam, Pumpkin Cream with Cilento EVO oil).
In 2025 the Great Taste Award in London followed, for the Extra Jam of White Dottato Figs: in that edition Minnelea was the only Italian producer awarded for jams.
Lined up, these steps say above all that the work is repeatable. And in the long run that is the only thing that really matters to whoever opens the jar at home.
What changes now
Honestly, little. The recipes stay the same, so do the suppliers, and production continues in the workshop in Moio della Civitella. Awards are useful because they give people who don't know us one more reason to trust a small company: they don't do tomorrow morning's work for us.
All the awards received, edition by edition, are collected on the Awards page.
