The reason for the question in the title of this post is because of two articles I ran across recently. The first article is titled “Wine-Tasting: it’s junk science” from the Guardian. It is about a winery owner who gets such inconsistent results with his wines at competitions that he started an experiment with the California State Fair to test the judges. They would put three samples poured from the same bottle into the tasting. Only about 10% of the judges were consistent on how they scored the wine. The second article is from Wine Business.com announcing Charles Shaw, aka Two Buck Chuck, won three gold medals at the 2013 Orange County Fair.
I would suggest you read the article at the Guardian, it is quite interesting even if you don’t agree with it. Tim Atkin, Master of Wine, has an interesting article on his site discussing the wine judging competitions at the Sacramento State Fair also. Another article which I do not agree with is Congratulations, not condescension are in order… at the Colorado Press. It mentions 70% of the wines in the competition got a medal, kind of makes medals meaningless.
While there are several well known wine critics whose opinions we love or despise, there are hundreds more in the way of judges at wine competitions and bloggers like us. The well known critics such as Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, Decanter, etc. have styles that we get to know through tasting the wines they rate.
However, the judges at all these wine competitions, who are they? What are their qualifications? Are their tastes similar to mine or quite different? I certainly don’t expect the judges to have the same preferences as I do, but I do expect them to know good wines from ordinary wines and to be consistent in their scoring.
First I will say I have never been a wine judge. I have attended tastings where there were more than 50 different wines of a single varietal and tastings where there were several hundred of many different varietals. I can appreciate the difficulty in keeping track of all the wines over a period of tasting.
Some competitions are very straight forward. The Lodi Consumer Wine Awards will only accept ordinary consumers as judges, I am not sure I could even be a judge there because I write a wine blog. They want ordinary consumers to rate wines for other ordinary consumers. They don’t want or need experts.
However, the California State Fair, Orange County Fair and other competitions around the country are trying to come across as professionals rating wines for the rest of us. Do they succeed? I don’t believe so. I have had a lot of gold medal winners I did not think were very good wines. Were they just not my style? Sometimes, but often I just didn’t feel the wine was balanced or it had other deficiencies.
Just to be sure I put my money where my mouth is I decided to hold a little wine competition of my own. I bought the 2011 Charles Shaw Cabernet Sauvignon and the 2012 Charles Shaw Merlot, the gold medal winners. I held a blind tasting of the two of them and one other wine with some friends I have been tasting with for several years. We all know each others tastes pretty well so there shouldn’t be any surprises. I put a 2009 Sterling Rutherford Cabernet Sauvignon in the tasting. The Sterling is just an every day red, nothing special or high end.
I did not tell anyone what the wines were or why we were tasting the wines. I just had them rate each wine on a scale of Yuk!, Not Good, Ok, Good and Very Good. I also tasted each wine, not blind however as I knew what they were. The results were pretty much what I expected with the exception of the Sterling. No wine received more than one “Good” rating except the Sterling with two. All other votes ranged from Yuk! to Ok. I even rated the Sterling just Ok and I generally really like Sterling wines.
Our conclusion was none of these wines should ever get a gold medal anywhere!
I feel wine judges for major competitions should have to be certified such as the American Wine Society Wine Judge Certification or some similar program if they are to have credibility. What is your opinion?
I’ve rushed out and bought three cases of Two Buck Chuck, and have enough money left over for 10 bags of Cheetohs too. Thanks you guys! Yes, yours isn’t the first article I’ve read on the inconsistencies (and what can seem to be outright madness) in wine judging. I agree with you that, even with all the differences in matters of taste, there should be some basis in talking about a good wine’s balance, structure, finish and such.
Just yesterday I read in a Smithsonian food article on many psychological experiments on why people say they like or dislike foods. They had added tasteless red food coloring to white wine, and responses to its taste changed from talking about floral notes to tannins. Oh well, at least I won’t confuse whiskey for wine.
I don’t think…