Just a few wines to be tasted at this years Indy International Wine Competition
Photo courtesy of Dave Falchek
It's official. We are done judging big, blind, medal-focused wine competitions.
We did not arrive at this position without much thought and
discussion. Ultimately, we believe that transparency and clarity are
core values that should permeate the wine world -- from the creation of
wine, to the marketing of wine, to the writing about wine.
Everything
that happens in those areas should relate in some way to answering this
question: Is this providing more transparency and clarity to the
consumer, or less?
We have decided that medal-focused
competitions provide less clarity and transparency to the wine consumer.
We feel that medals only confuse consumers instead of educating them, and that they provide little real value.
Our
position going forward will be simple: The editors and writers at the
New York Cork Report will not accept invitations to judge wines at
large-scale, blind-tasting events with the goal to hand out "medals" to
"winning" wineries.
We want to explain, and --
this is vitally important -- we mean no disrespect.
The vast, vast
majority of competition creators, organizers and judges perform their
roles with the best of intentions. Often, we find that the wines we
think are best are the ones that win top honors. Anthony Road
Wine Company's 2008 Semi-Dry Riesling winning the Governor's Cup is one
example).
But that cannot and does not change the reality: There are so many medal-awarding competitions
that the events have lost any sense of meaning to the average consumer,
and even wine-loving consumers can't possibly know the significance of a
single bronze or silver or gold medal awarded at the many, many events.
Furthermore, the very act of blind judging a wide range of wines should
be viewed as a parlor game and not some
official declaration of merit.
Good
intentions give way to nebulous marketing
We
can't stress this enough: The organizers of wine
competitions are people who constantly impress us with their enthusiasm
and event planning. Collectively, we have judged at many events and have been invited to judge at many more. We admire the goal of
wading through oceans of wine to sort out the very best for consumers.
The
problems with judging will be addressed below.
Even
the medal winners can't explain much about the meaning of such an
award. Evan recently stopped by a Finger Lakes tasting room that was
drowning in medals. He was told, "Our 2006 Merlot won Silver at the So-and-So Wine
Competition!" He asked the staff to explain what that meant. "Well, it
probably means that the judges liked our wine very much!" they replied. He asked who the judges were. They didn't know. He asked how many wines, by
percentage, got at
least a silver medal. "Oh, I don't think it's very many," came one
reply.
Sadly, that's wrong, by almost any measure.
On Long Island, Lenn has been similarly regaled by tasting room staffers with stories of medals awarded -- often incorrectly. He's up on some of these things, so he often knows that they are wrong when they tell him that their riesling won gold but it actually won bronze. The average person off the street can't possibly know; there are too many medals from too many competitions. Ultimately these medals and discussions of them have become nothing more than white noise, like static on your television.
Medals have almost no
defined meaning that the wineries themselves can even explain, let alone
their consumers. Ask a consumer what a medal means -- really, grab a
customer in a tasting room -- and there's almost no chance they'll be
able to offer anything close to an answer describing where it comes from
and why the judges awarded it.
It seems that
wineries simply hope the use of medals will make their bottles more
attractive. We understand the impulse. The business of wine is a competitive one, and
discretionary dollars are being held tightly. But ultimately a state
that is attempting to attain world-class status does itself a disservice
with an over-reliance on meaningless handouts.
We
can promise that almost every
tasting room customer would be shocked to find out that often the
standard for getting at least a bronze medal is simply to create a wine
that is not mortally flawed. That's it. That's the baseline.
The
first problem with judging: Subjectivity
At
Evan's first wine judging competition, a huge annual event that we won't
name, he remembers a debate over a flight of pinot noir. One judge refused
to award a particular wine a gold medal because, in his words, "There is
plenty of fruit but not nearly enough supporting oak." Evan, understandably, was stunned. A
judge demanding more oak? What next?
He didn't have to wait long to find out. During the next flight, a judge detected a whiff of Brettanomyces in
one of the wines. She decided it was a nice addition to the wine,
adding character. The judge to Evan's right was offended to the point of
near-insanity. "Brett is a FLAW," the judge declared. "And a flawed wine
wins no medal." The other
judge persisted, arguing that it should be a gold medal wine. Evan thought he was about to witness a fistfight.
How can
you or anyone else tell a judge how to evaluate wines? The beauty of wines is that we
have the opportunity to decide for ourselves what makes a wine special.
Now, that's not to say that there aren't clearly discernible qualities
and flaws. But if I love oak and over-extraction in, say, cabernet sauvignon, and you appreciate a more restrained approach, which one of
us is right? If I think the best wines are indicative of where they were
made, whereas you believe the best wines are hedonistic missiles,
place-be-damned, who's correct?
If you sit in
on a judge's panel at just about any wine competition, get ready to hear
the same conversations. And then ask yourself how anyone can possibly
hand out medals when it's over, as if one wine correctly identified that
7x4=28.
The second problem with judging:
Blind tasting
Everyone on the NYCR team has come to love blind
tasting. It is great fun. It is also a bit like a sporting event or game, not befitting the
anointing of medals that ostensibly carry serious value.
There
is perhaps no wine more fitting to explain this problem than Finger
Lakes riesling. The best winemakers in the Finger Lakes often remind
their customers that riesling is a "food wine." It certainly is. It is
versatile, ranging from dry to sweet, and pairs harmoniously with a
range of dishes. Winemakers have such things in mind when crafting their
products. But they are not producing rieslings designed to impress judges in sterile, blind-tasting settings.
Now try to imagine tasting dozens
and dozens of these wines with hardly a bite to eat. The acids are
ripping at your mouth, and in the sweeter flights the sugars seem like a
welcome respite. In the cabernet flight, there is no juicy steak to
accompany a rich wine, and the judges
are left to consider them bereft of that partnering.
But
most importantly, blind judging robs the evaluators of the most
significant parts of the wine -- its context.
Tell a judge he's drinking
cabernet, and he'll immediately try to lock in and ascertain the country
of origin, then the region and perhaps sub-appellation. But the mind is
a funny thing. Instead of simply enjoying (or not) the wine, and
thinking about it individually, the judge begins to add context where
there is none provided. How did the other wines in the flight taste in
comparison? What might that say about this wine? When was the last time I
tasted a wine like this one? Where was it from? Should I allow myself
to believe this is Bordeaux, when I'll feel awfully silly when I'm told
it's from somewhere else?
Delving deeper, we
find that judging a wine that is simply known as cabernet sauvignon is
extremely constricting. We don't want
a Napa cab to taste like a Bordeaux. We expect Chile to turn out
something else entirely. If we're tasting a Bordeaux cabernet that tastes like
Napa, we're bound to be disappointed. But tasting blind, we might convince
myself it's from somewhere else, mistaking place and winemaker
intention. Whoops.
We've had judges tell us that we should forget about figuring out where a wine is from and simply
taste it to see if we like it. Fair enough. But in that one statement, we
see exactly why wine has become so homogeneous, so dangerously banal.
Judges are not required to give a damn about a wine's sense of place.
We find it vital. With no standard, how can we expect judging to be
consistent?
Ah, but see: It's not consistent.
Not even a little.
There is ample evidence
that judging is like throwing darts
When
Robert T. Hodgson set out to research the reliability of
judging, many of us suspected he would find that judging is
inconsistent. Instead, he found that medals are awarded in a fashion
that almost appears to be random. Hodgson wrote, "It is reasonable to
predict that any wine earning any medal could in another
competition earn any other medal, or none at all." Indeed, he found
hundreds of examples of wines that earned gold medals in one competition
and no medal at all in another.
Put another
way: If you make a competent wine, you can enter enough competitions and
that wine will almost certainly win gold eventually.
No
study is perfect, but we suspected that after this study was released,
drastic changes would hit the wine judging circuit. We have yet to see
any. Hodgson stated that his goal was to provide some measure of judging
reliability to help these competitions improve. We see the result being
supportive of the idea that these competitions
ought not exist at all. After all, judging in mass competitions is
putting wine into just about the least most suitable place for good
evaluation and enjoyment.
And for wineries
that might protest, it should be said that the little study that has
been done only indicates that tasting room customers really don't care
much about medals. Why should they? As we've already explained, they
don't know what the medals mean.
Clarity?
Consumers don't know which wineries entered a particular competition and
which didn't, they don't know the judges and what the judges are
looking for, they don't know how many medals were awarded, and they
don't know what a medal is supposed to signify.
That
should say everything.
Our decision, and
our call for others to join us
In the
future we will politely decline invitations to judge at
these events. That does not mean we won't participate in wine seminars,
conferences, etc. This is simply about mass judging. The
wine competition circuit has become quite an industry itself, but there
has to be a good explanation for the purpose it serves.
We ask our
colleagues to do one of two things: Pledge to join us in this decision,
or provide a suitable answer for the problems we've outlined above.
We're more than willing to listen, and to change our minds if it can be
proven that these competitions help the consumer.
But
right now, we're sitting them out. - The NYCR Team
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