With the wine judging season finally at an end, it’s always fun to look at the results…but it’s even more fun to look behind the results. The biggest item to hit you on the head is that virtually every competition in the country had fewer entries than the previous last few years—and not just a few, but at least 15 to 20 percent less. With wineries springing up like mushrooms after a warm October rain, one would think there’d be more entries, not less.
Talk about wineries springing up, the same can be said for wine competitions. I guess every area of the country that grows grapes thinks it needs a competition. Sonoma County is living proof of this, with no less than eight competitions held each year. When you consider the rest of the state and then the rest of the country, the number of competitions a winery could enter is ridiculous. Now consider that entry fees vary from $40 to $75+ per wine and four to six bottles of each wine entered is required; then those bottles need to be shipped, which isn’t cheap! The costs of entering become very significant very quickly.
Is this a good investment in marketing? Will winning some medals sell more wine? Does the competition do a good job in promoting its winners? In most cases, the answer is “not really,” unless you’re one of the few that look up results on the Internet through your own curiosity. The Sonoma County Harvest Fair and the Cloverdale San Francisco Chronicle competition each have big public tastings featuring winners, but pouring at these events can be expensive from the winery’s standpoint. Might I add that the Harvest Fair seems to be losing some of its glitter, since sellouts are no longer a regular occurrence and winemakers and owners are seen less and less each year. Want to rub elbows with a winemaker? How can you when they aren’t there?
Is there a possibility that, because of the proliferation of competitions, they’ve become less meaningful? If, as a winery, you enter enough competitions, you’re bound to get lucky sometime and win some gold, which you can then promote. And since entrants are never listed if they don’t win something, you can always say you didn’t enter and that’s why you didn’t win anything. Shelf talkers for retail use, medal stickers to put on bottles and other media items may be added incentives for the wineries to enter. I guess, if medals sell wine, then everybody needs one—or does it lessen their value? I’ll let you make that choice.
Just glancing at some results I found online from a couple of local judgings, I see that, in the Savor magazine North of the Gate competition, gold medals were very hard to come by. There were none in Sauvignon Blanc, which I’ve always hailed as a true Sonoma County grape variety. Hats need to be tipped to Nicholson Winery, a relatively new kid in the Sonoma Valley, which won medals in virtually every class it entered, including many golds. The old standbys of Wilson Winery and Navarro Vineyards and Winery won more than their fair share of golds. Wilson and Matrix Winery consistently win golds, double golds and best of class with their classic Zinfandels and other reds.
When you see results like this over and over again, you’re assured high-quality wines are being produced. It’s too bad Nicholson doesn’t recognize its winemaker on its website. (An error by omission or choice, I wonder. Navarro seems to ignore its winemaker on the website also, and he’s been there for a long time doing a great job. Is the fact that winemaker Diane Wilson is Ken Wilson’s wife the reason she gets her well-deserved recognition on that company website?)
While we’re talking about wine and awards, has anybody noticed that, over that last few months, the Wednesday food/wine section in the Press Democrat has been having difficulty talking about Sonoma County wines as “wine of the week”? A while ago, Sauvignon Blanc was tasted, and all four mentioned wines were from Napa County. Don’t get me wrong, because all four are great wines, but what happened to a couple from Sonoma—or aren’t there any? I’ll be the first to admit several things about the variety. Yes, I was responsible for many hundreds of acres of it being planted back in the late 1970s because I thought it was going to be the next Chardonnay (or at least a close second). Dave Stare at Dry Creek Vineyards, Lou Preston at Preston Vineyards in the Dry Creek Valley, and Mike Benziger of Benziger Winery all led the way by making Sauvignon Blanc with a true definitive aroma of freshly mowed grass—a step back from the cat-pee version, where too much of a good thing is a disaster. Joe and Tom Rochioli have also succeeded in making Sauvignon Blanc as it should be. Meanwhile, other wineries were also making what they called Sauvignon Blanc, but theirs was a much more fruity style that was actually more like Chenin Blanc than Sauvignon Blanc.
No surprise then, that the public became confused about the two drastically different styles and, with no way to determine what was in the bottle from the label, they simply stopped buying it. It’s an absolutely classic case of consumer confusion that we’re still paying for. Much of the problem starts in the vineyard, where the grassy character can be manipulated by irrigation, trellis and other viticultural practices. Now that New Zealand is teaching the wine world what Sauvignon Blanc is all about, maybe we’ll start making it the way it should be. I can only hope. Since I’m not a true Chardonnay afficianado, maybe my next hope can be Pinot Gris, which (so far) hasn’t been over-oaked or given too much malolactic butter character. Pinot Gris can be a wine drinker’s wine, because it’ll never be worth more than $25 per bottle—good for me, bad for the winery.
With wine in over-supply, you better increase your homework to one and a half to two bottles per day to help the poor wineries and growers.
