I have grown weary of receiving almost daily faxes, emails and other communications from the public relations firms representing one winery or another, the purposes of those communications to tell me in glowing terms how their clients have been awarded a gold, silver or bronze medal in one international competition or another. I am well aware that the little gold stickers added to the necks of wine bottles help sell wine, but for many years I have questionned whether these competitions do a service or a dis-service to consumers. In fact, so skeptical have I become over the years, after seeing the results from well known and respected competitions in Bordeaux, Verona and London as well as in literally dozens of lesser known competitions in Tiblisi, Odessa and even Port-au-Prince, that I once wrote "with these prizes and about one dollar and twenty-five cents it would be possible to enter a bus in most Western cities".

Over the years, I have received and refused many invitations to serve as a judge in various wine politely stating that I doubted the value of such competitions. This year, however, I accepted an invitation to be a judge at the "Concorso Enologico Internazionale, 2002", the wine competition that precedes the VinItaly exposition in Verona. The Concorso, along with the competition at VinExpo in France, the International Wine and Spirits Competition in London and the Concourse Mondial held in Brussels, is considered one of the best organized and most prestigious of competitions and simply stated, the time had come for me to test the validity or non-validity of my hypothesis concerning the basic lack of meaing that can be attached to prizes awarded at such competitions.

A great deal of credit is due to the organizers of the competition. The tastings were double-blind so that no one of the judges or even those serving the wines had any way of identifying the wines except by their broad categories. The judges sat in complete silence, each at his or her own table that was equipped with anywhere from 16 - 20 glasses, each with their own score sheets. The wines were served, one wine every four minutes, by someilliers in training who also kept compelte slience and for each of six days from about 08:45 until about 13:00 judges tasted between 50 - 60 wines daily. Not only well organized, but extraordinarily well organized, the tastings ran like clockwork. Despite all of this, I found many problems, some so insurmountable that I could not help but conclue that the work of the judges had been largely in vain. Among those problems:

1. There is truth to the brochures of these competitions inform us that their judging panels are
composed of "respected journalists and oenologists". That does not, however, face the reality that many of the journalists (respected or not) who take part in these judging sessions know little or nothing about tasting wine! Some of the journalists who are respected for their writing about sports, economics, military affairs and politics were simply given "bonuses" by their editors and sent on a jaunt to Italy. As an example of precisely how serious this problem is, at least one "respected journalist" came to me on the first night of the competition in Vinitaly and asked if I could "teach him how to taste wine". In truth, the person in question was charming in every way. Another of the journalists, with a self avowed and quite evident love for grappa had an equally apparent and self-declared disdain for wine. What these and some of the others were doing as judges at VinItaly is something neither they nor I shall ever fully understand.

2. Despite the professionalism of the winemakers, oenologists and other wine professionals present it became immediately apparent that many of these people tended to overvalue wines and award them scores anywhere from 3 - 8 points higher than they deserved in order to assure that none of their colleagues would be overly embarassed by the results of the competition.

3. At the Concorso, as in many other competitions the overall jury is broken down to commissions of five to six judges. As each judge scores independently, so are the scores of his or her commission considered separately. When compiling the scores, however, the top and bottom score of each commission is dropped from consideration. This, together with the perhaps unconscious desire of judges not to be too far "at odds" with the group consensus, leads even further towards the statistical problem of regression to the mean, the result of which is that unusual or truly superb wines tend to drop down in score and truly average wines tend to rise. All in all, a rather skewered picture.

4. Truly top wineries rarely enter such competitions (at VinItaly, for example, not one of what I
would consider the top fifteen Italian producers had entered wines). This in turn means that prizes are invariably directed towards wineries not in the top ranks. This is even more true for the competition at VinExpo. From time to time a major winery will enter and when they do they enter so many different wines that it becomes statistically probable that by sheer bulk of presence they will walk off with a collection of prizes.

5. Lesser, even sometimes inferior wineries, enter wines in categories so limited in scope that they have litle competition and are thus almost bound to win at least an honorable mention. Among such categories for example are "sweet sparkling wines, not made in Champagne, that are oaked and between 3 - 5 years old".

6. Although a minimum score must be attained in order to win an an honorable mention, that score is rather low (80 out of 100 in the VinItaly competition; 70 out of 100 in the even more respected International Wine and Spirits Competition). In my own scoring, wines earning scores of 80 are "recommended but without great enthusiasm" and wines earning between 70 - 79 points are "average but at least somewhat faulted". Hardly award winning in my opinion!

7. There is no minimum score that must be attained to win a gold medal. At Vinitaly, for example,
this meant that even though only 2 wines scored 80 and 81 in the semi-dry Spumante category, one won the grand gold and the other the grand silver medals!!!! That seems somewhat of a joke considering that I would recommend neither of those wines to any but the most innocent of youths, and then only if I wanted for some reason or another, to punish them.

8. Another serious problem is that wines are submitted by the wineries and not purchased independently. We all know that all wineries and winemakers are honest but only the good lord knows what is really in those bottles!!

9. There are currently more than 300 competitions held annually. Some (not the ones at VinItaly,
VinExpo, IWSC, Bruxelles and others) actually let it be known that for an "entry fee" of "x" you will win a bronze medal, a fee of "y" will assure silver, and "z" will guarantee a gold.

In the end, I enjoyed and gained an enormous amount of knowledge at VinItaly which I consider one of the best and most important wine exhibitions in the world today. As to judging, let it be stated that this is my second judgeship - the first and the last and I shall continue my policy of not writing about prizes for even though they may be important to wineries, they have no value whatever for consumers.

© Daniel Rogov