Call me ironic but just last month after having denounced the whole idea of wine being made to compete, I am doing a column on it. I haven?t changed my stance, well, not entirely; I still despise most of them. But recently while judging at Juliet Cullinan?s Wine Awards I learnt many new things about competitions and how they can be made more effective. Which is exactly why I now do believe that an honest and sincere one can be conducted. Here are a few things you must keep in mind.
Large groups: Conducting a competition with a small group is very efficient and easy to control: fewer opinions, easier conclusions and by dividing the judges into many groups we can move the whole process along faster without making everyone taste truckloads of wines. Trouble is that a smaller reference group makes the result too specific with little room for discussions or debates. It also limits the styles of wines that may make the cut as a smaller group will never have as much palate variation. Seven on a group is ideal.
A visionary convener: Every herd needs a leader, someone to head the pack, even at a round table. This helps as it provides a certain sense of direction to the other people on the panel and also helps settle matters in case of inter-group disputes. A group convener can also assist by sharing from his/her vast experience thus educating other members of the jury and maintaining a unanimity of vision and direction as laid down and envisaged by the people who constituted the award. This is useful even more if they have judged for the same competition before.
Varied Mix: It is best to have judges from different tasting backgrounds ? winemakers, journalists, sommeliers, even consumers. This helps moderate the results for all segments that would choose or use the wine. A tasting done by winemakers exclusively can be too strict and they tend to mark down anything that does not subscribe to what they think is wine.
Cross reference/checks: A good albeit tedious and time-consuming idea is to make one group taste the wines as tasted by another just so to get a better idea of uniformity and consistency and also to eliminate vagrancies. This is good because after a few rounds of tasting members of a group may evolve a tendency to agree with each other. Cross checking eliminates such scope for errors.
So now you have all the makings of a good wine competition but I?ll be a cross-dressing granny before you can suss consumer preference correctly even half the time. The biggest of wine heads get it wrong ever so often. For eg, how often do you know for sure what is wrong when you ask your girlfriend so and she replies, ?Nothing?? Similarly, wine too is elusive and mysterious.
One prize, one certificate, one explanation or, as with women, one answer will never be enough, or correct. Thankfully!
The writer is a sommelier