BERKELEY SPRINGS - Some 24 hours before a shocking Best Picture snafu rocked Sunday night's Oscars, drama of another kind was unfolding at an event dubbed the Academy Awards of water right here in West Virginia.
The 27th annual Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting had all the makings of a Hollywood affair. Heated competition in multiple categories, guests from all over the globe and a black-tie awards ceremony to hand out striking glass trophies shaped like giant water droplets.
And just like the real Academy Awards televised internationally a day later, there was a remarkable story with a surprise ending at the end of the night on Feb. 25.
Here's the scoop. An event featuring a blind tasting of more than a hundred waters is, as you might imagine, quite a logistical feat to organize. Nearly a dozen judges spend hours rating samples on clarity, smell, taste, mouthfeel and overall drinkability over the course of several hours.
It's the largest and longest-running water tasting in the world, with entrants coming from 19 U.S. states, five Canadian provinces and 12 foreign countries, including several newcomers this year.
One of those was New Zealand native Jesse Ball, owner of Waiheke Water, whose first-time participation in this global event was such a point of pride back home publications ran stories about him leading up to the big competition.
So when Ball arrived in Berkeley Springs on Feb. 23, he had the hopes of an entire country riding on his shoulders.
What he didn't have, however, was his water.
Shipped to the states in advance, Ball's was the only entry that had not arrived in Berkeley Springs - a fact he didn't discover until he got here. His efforts to track it down read like a script to a big-budget Hollywood thriller.
"He's been on the phone for two days, desperately trying to find his water, and he's been given a different story every time," Jeanne Mozier, the water festival's original founder, told me the day before final judging was to begin.
One person told him the shipment never made it to the U.S., another reported it was loaded on a train to be delivered, and yet another said actually it had been confiscated and was still sitting in storage at the Los Angeles airport.
Transportation Security Administration, Food and Drug Administration, and Customs officials were called in hopes of getting some answers. That led to more conflicting stories, more phone calls, more waiting.
In the meantime, festival organizers told Ball his late water still could be judged during the final round of competition - but only if it made it by then, and only if he could somehow pass preliminary judging first.
Holding on to that hope, Ball resorted to desperate measures to make the preliminary cut. He gathered dozens of tiny sample bottles he'd brought in his luggage and emptied them, one by one, in a carafe to make up an amount large enough for first-round judging.
"What a nightmare for this poor guy," Mozier said, shaking her head. "Can you imagine, flying all the way here from New Zealand and then facing this?"
When the final day of the festival arrived, Bell's water still hadn't. Resigned to sitting on the sidelines this year, he nonetheless clapped along as awards were announced - some of them even going to fellow New Zealand entrants.
But it was the evening's final award that, perhaps, drew the biggest applause.
After all votes were tallied for the People's Choice Award honoring bottled waters with the best packaging, Bell's little bottles from New Zealand took home a silver medal for their striking S-curve design.
It was a somewhat happy ending to Bell's Oscar-worthy horror story.
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As for the tasting awards themselves, the municipal water category was a battle of past champions with the top five winners all being former Berkeley Springs gold medalists. All the municipal winners were American waters and most were from middle America.
"The consistency in winners from year to year, even with different panels of judges, validates their choices and speaks to the impressively high caliber of the waters entered." said Arthur von Wiesenberger, a certified water master who helped train judges on the nuances of tasting a substance most people find tasteless.
The bottled water category was so competitive there were ties for both gold and silver, and last year's best sparkling water repeated as this year's champion. Hometown favorite Berkeley Springs also placed second in the purified water category, with three of the other four winners in that class all consisting of new oxygenated waters from Toronto.
"It was another wonderful year for the longest-running and largest water tasting in the world," von Wiesenberger said.
At the conclusion of the day-long water tasting was the famed Water Rush, in which the audience is invited to rush the stage to snatch hundreds of extra bottles of water sent as part of the judging.
"I spent hours arranging all the waters in a display," Mozier said, "and the crowd spent less than 10 minutes making it all disappear."
Here's the complete list of winners for this year's 27th annual Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting:
n Best Municipal Water: Montpelier, Ohio; Emporia, Kansas; Hamilton, Ohio; Metropolitan Water District of Southern California; Independence, Missouri.
n Best Bottled Water: (tie) Zaros Natural Water from Crete, and AlphaPure Springs Water from Ocala, Florida; (tie) Artesia from Crystal Falls, Michigan, and Canadian Gold Artesian Water from Marchand Manitoba, Canada; Svalbaroi Polar Iceberg Water from Longyearbyen, Norway; Planet H2O Natural Artesian Water from Knoxville, Tennessee; Whistler Water from Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
n Best Sparkling Water: (tie) Tesanjski Kiseljak from Tesanj, Bosnia, and Touch Sparkling Mineral Water from Marchand, Manitoba, Canada; Otakiri Reserve from Otakiri, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand; Aqua Nobel Carbonated Water from Morap, Sweden; Oro Luxury Water from Vizianius, Macedonia; Antipodes Sparkling Water from Whakatane, New Zealand.
n Best Purified Drinking Water: GP8 Oxygen Water from Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Berkeley Springs Purified Water from Berkeley Springs; Thermodx Thirst Oxygen Water from Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Thermodx Thirst Alkaline Water from Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Rain Fresh Bottled Water from Garland, Texas.
n Best Packaging: Svalbaroi Polar Iceberg Water from Longyearbyen, Norway; Waiheke Imperial from Waiheke Island, New Zealand; Antipodes from Whakatane, New Zealand.
Steven Keith writes a weekly food column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail and an occasional food blog at blogs.wvgazettemail.com/foodguy. He can be reached at 304-380-6096 or by email at wvfoodguy@aol.com. You can also follow him on Facebook as WV Food Guy and on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest as WVFoodGuy.