That's usually one of the snickers I get when I tell people I judge competitions -- along with, "Boy, I wish I could do that" and similar bits of cleverness.
And the Wine Curmudgeon will be the first to admit that judging a competition is not as difficult as mining coal or working at Burger King (my first job, which broke me of the desire to ever have a real job). But it is work.
Take, for example, the Southwest Wine Competition in Taos, N.M., which I noted last week. Was it as difficult as bagging groceries (another of the Wine Curmudgeon's teenaged occupations)? Nope. It wasn't even as difficult as other competitions I have judged, since it had fewer entries. But we did start drinking wine at 9 a.m., which requires a certain amount of fortitude.
Most wine competitions work the same way. A panel of judges tastes flights of similar wine -- chardonnays, for example, or merlots -- and then discuss amongst themselves whether to give a wine a medal. That can be as many as 20 or 30 flights of wine a day (and even more for big competitions), which makes swishing and spitting a requisite. A flight can have one or two wines or as many as seven or eight.
We were toward the lower limit in Taos, and most of the flights had fewer rather than more wines. This made for less of what's called tasting fatigue, in which your palate starts to give out somewhere in the middle of the afternoon and it becomes much harder to taste what's going on. I've known judges at big competitions, like The Dallas Morning News who must sort through more than hundred big, red wines in one day. That will tannin up your mouth.
How do judges discuss amongst themselves? Usually with a fair amount of decorum, although some harsh glances can be passed when they disagree. There are several possible judging methods, including scoring systems. We used a 20-point system from the American Wine Society. We scored each wine, totaled the scores for the five judges, and then hashed out results -- no medal, bronze, silver or gold.
I'm not a big fan of points systems. I prefer the card system, in which judges taste the wine and then hold up a card: blank for no medal, or bronze, silver, or gold. As regular visitors here know, I don't know that wine can be scored, and that a wine's value is usually more or less than the sum of its score.
How did we do? Very well, I thought. The scoring was consistent, and we didn't give out medals just to give out medals, which sometimes happens. I'll go into more detail about the wines when the results are released, but I was impressed with the quality. Often, too many wines at regional competitions are flawed; that wasn't the case here.
And I had a good time, not just because of the quality of the competition and the judges, but because I got to taste some incredibly interesting wines. How often does one see a sparkling wine from Oklahoma?
