Summer is the time for county fairs and local wine competitions.   Organizers solicit samples from wineries and then convene panels—often very large panels—who will “judge” the wines and then award medals.  San Francisco holds one of the biggest, but cities of all sizes across the country stage their own events.

We think the whole concept of panels scoring wines, whether with points or medals, is flawed but that’s another post.  What caught our attention about inherent problems with these competitions was a recent post in Palate Press by W. Blake Gray, a frequent judge at wine competitions.  Grey is pretty convincing in his position that judges are often browbeat by other judges and scores are commonly manipulated to the point of meaninglessness. 

We wonder if blatant manipulation of scores, such as he describes, occurs across the board, but we had some firsthand experience recently in San Diego at a tasting of “award winning” wines that, with few exceptions, turned out to be pretty dismal.

Click here to read Mr. Gray’s post.