WHAT’S THE MEANING OF A MEDAL-WINNING WINE?

One must keep in mind that not all competitions are created equal

Readers have asked recently about the meaning of wine competitions. It’s a query I often get, because wine competitions have proliferated in the past 10 or 20 years, and wine producers often cite the medals they’ve won.

I’ve just judged in a competition for Canadian wines (the All-Canadian Wine Championships), and every time I judge, I think about the meaning of the activity.

First, not all competitions are equal. Within the wine world, there’s an informal ranking of competitions. Some, like the annual competition sponsored by Decanter (the British wine magazine), and the Jimmy Watson competition (for the best one- or two-year-old red wine in Australia), carry a lot of weight. Others, like small regional competitions, don’t.

Any competition’s reputation stems from the quality of the judges. Judging the judges can be subjective, but if you’re thinking of buying a wine and part of its attraction is that it won a competition’s gold medal, you might want to visit the competition’s website and see who the judges were. (Any reputable competition will provide this information.)

Even then, you might not get the information you want. A good judge should be deeply involved in wine, and taste and judge regularly, to ensure that she or he has a wide context from which to assess the wines.

You might also want to know how medals are awarded. Some competitions use an Olympic system: the highest score gets a gold, the next a silver, the next a bronze. Of course, that would mean that very few wines in any category (say, unoaked chardonnays or pinot noirs under $25) get medals. So some competitions give gold medals to all wines in the top tenth-percentile, when the wines are ranked by score. That guarantees that about 10 per cent of wines get gold medals (and 10 per cent get silver and bronze medals). That seems fine, but what happens if all the wines in a category are really great? Or they are all terrible? In the first case, some deserving wines would miss out on medals, and in the second case, some awful wines would win medals.

Other competitions give medals according to the scores judges give them, like a gold medal for any wine scoring 18 points or more on a 20-point scale, a silver for wines scoring between 16.5 and 17.9 points, and so on. This system means that, depending on the overall quality of the wines, there is a possibility that all wines will get medals, or none will.

There’s no easy generalization about the value of competitions — except that you shouldn’t assume that a medal-winning wine is necessarily superior. Not all wines are entered in competi- tions, and not all producers place as much weight on their value.