If last year's winners of the Geoffrey Roberts Award were, coincidentally, based in Georgia and Russia, this year's winner and runner up want to go to Sri Lanka and India respectively.
The 2005 Geoffrey Roberts Award, the international annual travel bursary worth £3,000 (US$6,000), has been won by Mary Taylor of New Zealand. She has been running food tours of Sri Lanka’s tea plantations for some time and is determined to spend her travel bursary on improving conditions for three small fishing communities on the south coast of Sri Lanka which are currently in desperate need of support. Her Project Oru 100 aims to raise sufficient funds to build 100 outriggers (orus, pictured), the boats on which the local communities here depended for their chief protein source and income until the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 destroyed 80 per cent of them.
She plans to renew her acquaintance with this devastated region, recording what she sees and learning more about the local culture, fishing methods and cuisine. She will then return to New Zealand and use her newly acquired knowledge to raise funds for Project Oru 100 via a series of food-related presentations around New Zealand. These funds will be administered by the MJF Foundation (www.mjffoundation.org), the charitable foundation established in 2003 for the disadvantaged in Sri Lanka by Merrill J Fernando of Dilmah Tea which has already achieved a great deal but still needs much more help before the needs of the communities devastated by the tsunami are met.
Says Mary Taylor: “I know that the southern coast area with which I am involved is but a drop in the ocean in the great scheme of things but it is an area with which we empathise (food, fishing and long term sustenance) and where we can actually see and measure positive impact.”
The runner-up in this year’s Geoffrey Roberts Award is Viv Menon, a young man whose Anglo-Indian family live near St-Emilion and who has just completed a Wine MBA at Cirencester. His aim is to have a positive influence on the emerging market for wine in India and to this end the Geoffrey Roberts Trust plans to cover his expenses for a trip to visit wine producers in the state of Maharashtra and improve his understanding of the emerging Indian wine market.
The Geoffrey Roberts Award (www.geoffreyrobertsaward.com) is a registered charity which has given an international travel bursary every year since 1996 in memory of Geoffrey Roberts, the pioneer importer of New World wines into the UK.
This year’s judges, Jill Dupleix of The Times, Paul Henderson of Gidleigh Park and committee members Neville Abraham CBE, Sally Clarke of Clarke’s, Willie Lebus of Bibendum Wine and Jancis Robinson were impressed by the high standard of this year’s applicants who came from four continents and ranged in age from 27 to 57.
To apply for next year’s Award, visit www.geoffreyrobertsaward.com at the beginning of 2006.
