Are wine competitions useful?

Wine competitions organized by authoritative entities offer professional wine tasters from around the world an opportunity to evaluate wines without bias through blind tastings.

By personal answer is: yes. Wine competitions are for the most part, when organized in a professional way, can be very useful. And I can say his having myself taken part in many of them.

For the eighth year in a row, I have been on the jury at the Decanter World Wine Awards (DWA) in London. This year, from April 30 to May 4, I was able to sample over 300 Italian wines together with the other members of the jury who were among the best tasters in Italy and Britain. People like Richard Baudains, Jane Hunt, Michael Gardner, Alessandro Torcoli and Alessandra Piubello along with authentic icons of British journalism including Andrew Jefford and Steven Spurrier who oversaw the event. The results and prizes awarded had an excellent impact on the public of wine lovers who in Britain want conclusions to be the result of professional and expert opinions without any ulterior motives.

This year I was also chairman of the jury at the Vitigno Italia awards, in Naples, and at the beginning of July I will join Luca Gardini for the Best Italian Wine Awards (BIWA). While not wishing brag, I can say that I am lucky to be able to take part in many “blind” tastings, organized by competent entities, and to compare my evaluations with those of authoritative people and this without personally asking for samples from producers, something that I consider to be a good thing and respectful towards them.

Every once in a while I hear about requests, more like orders, for as many as six bottles of a wine for a  “tasting” by a blogger, a guide compiler or sector journalist and I feel this is, to put it politely, represents a total lack of class and something I could never do nor approve of. And I do not even want to imagine what happens to the leftover bottles from such tastings. We at DoctorWine sometimes ask for sample bottles or accept those sent to us but never more than one bottle of a particular type and never more than three or four per producer and only if there are no alternatives. For the most part, we taste wines at competitions like the ones mentioned above or events organized by producer associations or at trade fairs like Vinitaly. Thus the fact that yours truly is part of a jury or that, for example, our collaborator Fabio Casamassima went to China to be on the jury of the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles is something useful as well as prestigious. That said, it is clear that all evaluations are subjective and never absolute and that there exist many points of view and many different approaches to tastings. But among qualified and competent people, as Paolo Conte said, eventually “professionals make mistakes” and I must say that I have never had opinions that were very different from those of the other jury members and none in those competitions.

What’s more, it is very unlikely that any Italian or world wine expert would risk their reputation at such events, which are more designed for those seeking exposure, for relatively unknown producers, and offer an opportunity to discover a novelty or better understand new areas.

This year in London, for example, Lugana wines did very well and while these wines are quite well-known and even “trendy” in Italy, abroad it is a totally different story. The same could be said of many areas in Southern Italy, where wines are improving year after year. All these considerations allow me to wonder why, above all in Italy, there is often an ambiguous and skeptical view of wine competitions that, on the other hand, in the majority of cases represent an efficient venue to obtain independent information and evaluations given by experts.