I’m a fan of wine competitions, for the most part. I have judged at hundreds over the years, and continue to be active on the competition circuit. Much of what I expect to write here will spring from what I find by sitting on a panel at a wine competition. The wines I write of won’t necessarily be the sweepstakes winners or even best-of-class wines. They could be wines that only drew one vote for a gold medal – mine – on a panel with two to four other judges.
My reasoning: Customarily, judges learn identities of wines they have judged blind long after awards have been bestowed. Then, and after I have had an opportunity to retaste the wine that only I thought deserved gold, I will either concur with fellow judges that I overlooked a shortcoming or they overlooked a wine of beauty and vitality. In the latter instance, even if a wine got only a silver or bronze medal from the group, I well may write of it. Wines that tend to win gold medals commonly are wines of heft and concentration, often weighty with oak and alcohol, though there are exceptions. Most of the exceptions, however, which is to say wines of leanness and nuance, generally end up with silver medals, and if that is the style you prefer you maybe should take silver-medal wines more seriously than gold-medal wines.
My initial eagerness to judge wines at competitions, even homemade wines, was selfish. Competitions gave me a way to discover and write of a whole bunch of exciting wines that I wouldn’t have been able to taste otherwise. Most of my writing of wine was during my 30 years in the features department of The Sacramento Bee, but wine was the last of my priorities.
During my early years at The Bee I was expected to devote most of my time to writing a broad range of features. This was fun, giving me an opportunity to hang out with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr., Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Julia Child, Alice Waters, Francis Ford Coppola and many other newsmakers of the day, sometimes some of them being high-profile winemakers, such as Robert Mondavi, Randall Grahm, Merry Edwards and Jed Steele.
Gradually, food became my principal focus, then restaurants. Wine was in the mix, but my first responsibilities were to stay somewhat atop the fast-evolving food and restaurant scenes in and about Sacramento. When I retired I was The Bee’s food editor, restaurant critic and wine columnist.
Most of my time went into overseeing the food section, followed by restaurant critiques and other dining-out reporting, including one of The Bee’s early blogs, Appetizers. Wine was the caboose in that train. As a consequence, I wasn’t much able to visit wine regions, even in California. Thus, my emphasis on wines from areas in the immediate Sacramento area and my eagerness to join wine competitions, some so small they could be completed in a day, some so large that up to four days would be needed to sniff, sip and spit. These venues not only provided me with an opportunity to taste upwards of 100 wines in one day’s sitting, they helped provide instruction in grape growing and winemaking because fellow panelists often were winemakers, wine retailers, wine collectors, and wine educators, all of them almost always eager to elaborate on their conclusions.
Within wine-writing circles, wine competitions are more often belittled than praised. To be sure, they often have their flaws. The most common is that judges usually are expected to evaluate upwards of 100 wines in a single sitting, twice what the total should be to avoid palate fatigue, loss of concentration and inaccuracy. That’s not only my suspicion, but the conclusion of wine competitions in other countries, where standards almost without exception are more strict than they are in the United States, including the imposition of a maximum 50 or so wines to be judged in a day.
I could go on and on about how wine competitions could be improved, beyond cutting back on the number of wines that judges are expected to evaluate. For one, classes of wine should be organized by region of origin as well as grape variety or style, given that wine traditionally has been so closely associated with place; yet, wine competitions continue to group Chardonnays from Santa Barbara with Chardonnays from Sonoma Coast, though the regions are vastly different in climate and terrain. So it goes for other classes and other areas. For another, wine competitions only rarely qualify judges with any kind of testing or tutoring. For another, even more rarely does a wine competition provide feedback to winemakers to explain why judges liked or disliked wines.
Organizers of wine competitions, however, are notoriously resistant to change. Only in the past few years have some acknowledged that judging panels are heavy with “old white guys,” and now see value in adding panelists from more varied backgrounds. But by and large, the attitude of organizers is that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. As a sign that wine competitions aren’t seen as broken, their numbers are proliferating, and they basically all follow the same format, at least in the United States.
Often, the revenues that wine competitions get from entry fees are supplemented by income generated by such add-ons as a promotional publication heavy with advertising by wineries boasting of their awards, or tastings where medal-winning wines are poured for hundreds of paying attendees. Granted, this money sometimes is used to benefit the likes of wine education, student scholarships, county-fair programs and the like, though organizers of wine competitions customarily are tight-lipped about just how much money they take in and how it is dispersed. More transparency would help give competitions that are candid more respect among consumers and vintners.
Though the number of wine competitions is rising, entries have dropped at many judgings, sometimes dramatically. Organizers attribute this decline to such factors as the Covid-19 pandemic, which involved both a bump in sales without the benefit of gold medals and the layoff of personnel who in many cases would be responsible for submitting entries to a competition.
Whether entries rebound and even rise remains to be seen. I have a hunch they won’t, largely because the market is being saturated with gold-medal wines, diluting the significance of the award. The same fallout could be occurring with the similar proliferation of wines being scored 90 to 100 points by some critics. Too many gold-medal wines and too many wines with 95-point scores lessens the potential impact of both.
If a wine competition would like to break from the pack and elevate its stature, here’s a suggestion: Announce at the outset that a quota would be imposed on gold-medal wines, say just the highest scoring three percent of entries. Now, without any kind of quota, around 10 percent of entries generally win gold medals. Granted, a tight quota might jeopardize the number of wines entered, given how eager winemakers are to gather gold. On the other hand, by raising the bar a wine competition conceivably could attract more entries from winemakers who appreciate the higher and more significant standard.
I hope to continue to join wine competitions as long as I am invited and as long as I have confidence in my own ability to judge. I began to judge commercial wines in or about 1985. At that time I passed – barely, but passed nonetheless – the test that the California State Fair commercial wine competition was using to qualify potential judges. Since then, I think I have become stronger at evaluating wine, in no small measure because of wine competitions. Typically, a panel at a wine competition will consist of a winemaker, wine merchant, wine educator and wine writer, or some similar mix.
In short, a wide spectrum of experience, maturity, preferences and abilities will be at the table, each judge facing an arc of glasses holding pours of 10 or so wines of comparable pedigree. They will taste and score each, then collaborate on their impressions.
Winemakers are notorious for focusing on flaws, wine merchants for wines they would like to sell, wine educators for lectures on possible provenance. For me, the exchanges during these deliberations have been like attending one wine-appreciation course after another at the University of California, Davis, each led by a different instructor, but all adding up to a better understanding of wine styles, wine strengths and wine shortcomings.
I hope wine competitions continue to play a significant role on the world wine scene, and I believe they can, if only they were to raise their standards so results would be more meaningful to consumers.