Rodeo Uncorked!, the international wine competition of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, gets under way Friday. This will be the 20th roundup. I haven’t kept track of how many times I have judged at Houston, but show organizers say this is my 18th rodeo.
A bit more than 3000 wines have been entered. More than 100 judges – sommeliers, winemakers, wine educators, wine retailers, wine writers – will convene over three days in Houston’s sprawling NRG Center, next to the abandoned and eerie Astrodome. (To its credit, the Houston competition is one of the few to still assign five judges to a panel, thereby bringing a broader range of perspectives, experience and voice to consideration of each wine; other competitions generally have gone to three persons per panel.)
Judges won’t know the identity of wines they evaluate. Judging sheets include a mysterious numerical code for each entry. No connection between code and identity of wine will be revealed until well after the competition.
The Judging Sheet
Judging sheets are intriguing in other ways, whether at Houston or most any competition. For one, they are printed on paper. Scores of reams of fine paper are used at each competition. A more sound resource-friendly option is at hand – the electronic tablet or smartphone, but no competition to my knowledge has gone that route. (To be fair, many competitions have switched to online entry forms.)
When they take their seats, judges will face a stack of judging forms. Flight after flight, the papers will be shuffled as 10 or so wines are set out for each round in a pretty arc of glasses. In addition to the code, each sheet commonly will include for each wine such information as the varietal or style of wine being assessed, the vintage, alcohol content and residual sugar. Sometimes, price or a price category will be included. Occasionally, though rarely, place of origin. There will be space to jot comments and to designate an award for each wine.
Much chatter is occurring in wine circles these days about how the wine trade could soften its impact on the environment, from adopting sustainable farming practices to taking advantage of lighter bottles, the latter urged to lessen both exploitation of resources and the environmental consequences of shipping heavy loads. Wine competitions are pretty much oblivious to these concerns.
At the same time, the wine trade anguishes over the tepid acceptance younger consumers are giving wine. Those younger consumers often are more environmentally sensitive than their elders. How, then, might wine competitions help the business respond more aggressively and positively to climate change while also broadening the appeal of wine to younger generations?
A New Judging Sheet
The answer is the judging sheet. In my fantasy wine competition, judges in their evaluation of each wine would be asked to consider the environmental impact of the wine, and factor that consideration into assigning medals. In other words, judging sheets, in addition to including such information as alcohol content and residual sugar, also would include this sort of data: Whether the vineyard that provided the grapes for the wine was sustainably, biodynamically, organically or regeneratively farmed; the percentage of the winery’s power generated by solar or wind sources; the type of fuel used for forklifts and tractors; and the weight of the bottle in which the wine is packaged.
Wineries would provide this information on entry forms, then it would make its way to judging sheets, as with alcohol content and residual sugar. How would this information be verified? Responsible wine competitions reserve the right to audit information provided for any wine that wins a high honor, and sometimes an award will be withdrawn if information was misrepresented.
Judges would be directed to continue to keep a wine’s aesthetics foremost in mind as they evaluated entries. In Houston, that is summed up as the “BLIC” standard – balance, length, intensity, complexity. An environmental reality check, however, could come into play when judge or panel is vacillating, say, between awarding either a silver or a gold medal to a wine. If information on that wine on the judging sheet showed an environmentally savvy consciousness, judges well might concur that it should move up. And, ultimately, that reasoning would be conveyed to consumers via press releases, website announcements, wine columns, shelf hangers and the like.
The existing judging sheet is a relic as outdated as the Astrodome. Time for a reimagining.