Strange Predictions: Lotte Duty Free’s Robbie Zhang wins our Six Nations rugby competition

INTERNATIONAL. Lotte Duty Free Assistant Buyer, Melbourne-based Robbie Zhang, is the winner of our latest Strange Predictions* contest hosted by Strange Nature Gin of New Zealand but like the England v Scotland rugby match it was a mightily close finish.

We called on travel retail and aviation sector rugby pundits to make their predictions for the recent Six Nations Rugy matches, Wales v Ireland, England v Scotland and Italy v France.

Entrants had to:

• Pick the winner of each match (or a draw)
• Predict the scoreline
• Tell us which region of New Zealand Strange Nature comes from.

The winner had to correctly predict the victor in each match (while several entrants plumped for a Scottish victory, which would have happened but for a missed last-minute conversion, most correctly chose England) .

The results were:

Wales 18 v Ireland 27

England 16 v Scotland 15

Italy 24 v France 73

And Strange Nature comes from Marlborough, New Zealand.

After that, the result was based on cumulative points differential across all three games. So for the Ireland vs Wales 27-18 result, a 35-10 prediction would mean a points differential of 16. The lower the total differential over the trio of matches the better.

France’s blowout scoreline vs Italy caught every entrant out badly. Lagardère Travel Retail Senior Advisor, Corporate Communications & External Affairs John Rimmer came closest with a 31-points differential having predicted France would score 42 points, followed by Robbie Zhang who plumped for 40.

But Robbie was right on the money with the Wales points score (18), and very close with those of Italy, Scotland and Ireland to take out the spoils with a gross differential of 64 points, just one ahead of ARI Global Corporate Finance Lead John Wallace, who brilliantly picked his home country’s 27 points and was in single-point differential territory for all other teams except France, whom he chose to win by just 28-22 over Italy. That left him just too much of a gap to make up with our winner.

In third place was Global Drinks Ltd Founder and Managing Director Harry Kartasis with 71 points, again scuppered by the France points tally.

As with all our Strange Predictions competitions, the winner, in this case Robbie, receives a bottle of the outstanding Strange Nature Gin, whose spirit base is drawn from Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Strange indeed. 

As reported, Strange Nature was recently named one of the ten 2024 Gins of the Year at the prestigious International Wine & Spirit Competition.

Coming soon…

Thanks to all those who took part in this fun contest. No sooner is one Strange Predictions competition done, however, than, like Strange Nature Gin on the bottling line, another comes along.

This week we will be asking travel retail’s sporting pundits to pick the results of two matches from different sports. Watch this space.