The Blog

There have been a lot of opinions flying around recently about the validity of wine competitions. Surely it all depends on who you are trying to influence? I was involved in this trade myself, as organiser of the International Wine Challenge under Robert Joseph and Charles Metcalfe for 3-4 years – I even ran the first ever Asia Pacific Wine Challenge with Robert back in, I think, 1997. This experience at least qualifies me to say that, to the best of my knowledge, the majority of competitions are run extremely well and completely impartially. Any discrepancies lie not with the competitions per se, but with the wines and the judges and most importantly, with the purpose of the tasting in the first place. Competitions are important because medals help sell wine. Let’s face it, any point of difference that isn’t ‘price’ is a blessing and should be leverage to the max in a market where a wine has, what, 35,000 competitors in the UK alone. As a wine PR and marketer, I am desperate to get away from price, and wish the blessed thing had never been invented. But are the medals really awarded to the right wines? Recent surveys have pointed out that one man’ s nectar is another man’s poison – for example, the physiological differences between tasters mean they sometimes may as well be evaluating different wines. See http://bit.ly/mubNy for an insight, as tweeted by Robert. Most importantly, are the right people actually judging the wines? To answer this, we need to look at who the medals are designed to influence – the potential purchasers. And here is the problem. Most competitions have the very same judges evaluating £4 wines as they do £20 wines – and yet the target purchasers of these wines are completely different, with different expectations and knowledge. Whilst I understand the concept of having wine professionals evaluating and rewarding wine for technical excellence, having these same experts indicate which wines taste great and which don’t to the full spectrum of wine drinkers seems to be a little outdated and wide of the mark. The wines that the wine trade and wine judges like and want to award are very often not the wines that sell like hot cakes. These big sellers sell for one simple reason – the consumer loves the way they taste. Take the currently popular sweet new world rosé, such as Gallo Family Vineyards White Grenache. This is the nation’s top selling rose, a wine that the public loves (just listen to them at Fairs if you have any doubts) and yet it is highly unlikely to pick up a medal. So who exactly are these medals serving? Maybe we need different competition formats and judges depending on the price point? This would acknowledge that different people want different things from the wine they drink, and that every palate is different. Maybe social media will provide us with the answer, through the communities and communications channels they provide? Time will tell.