Hi. I am working through on answering some qu. about Wine competitions. Maybe some of you can offer some insight:

1) As far as why wine competitions arose, is it merely because back in the 1960's the Calif winemakers wanted their wines to rival the French ones? Any other reasons why wine competitions arose?

2) Is there any criticism against wine competitions? I can only think of impartiality or lack of fairness upon some, and lack of proper wine tasting provisions (temp, glassware, etc.) Can someone add to this?

PS. I am mainly interested in the Sydney and San Fran. Int'l Wine Competitions.

There's nothing new about wine competitions. What I've seen is in relation to CA wines. Basically, when they were good enough, as in the late 1800s, there were international competitions for them to be recognized in.

Okay, looks like the first internationally recognized CA wine was in an 1869 exposition. And the California State Viticultural Commission began sponsoring competitions in 1883. In 1888, more credibility was lended, as they introduced blind tasting to the process. (Source: "A Companion to California Wine" - Charles L Sullivan)

There's been plenty of criticism. A lot of producers don't participate, for various reasons.

Depending on who the judges are, what the procedures are, etc., results are highly variable.

Big flashy wines stand out and are rewarded. More subtle wines can be ignored/underrated.

A lot of them don't mean anything. See TORB's piece on the Leasingham Bin 61 for starters and the paper by Robert Hodgson that he references.

Wine competitions hand out medals like confetti to the vast majority of entrants. You would be forgiven for thinking that every category awards a single Gold, Silver and Bronze, rather like sporting events. Instead they are scored individually by the judges, and the results tallied. A final score in the 80-85 range gives you a Bronze. 85-90 gets you a Silver and 90+ gets you a Gold. If all the judges agree that it's 90+ then it gets Double Gold. The highest scoring wine gets Best In Class, of which only one is awarded, but there are so many classes.

Frankly, a Bronze medal should be considered a red flag: This wine scored 85 or less. What would be really interesting to know is which wines were entered but did not get a medal - the 79 or less scores.

The other, unavoidable problem, is that it's pay to play. Spectator gets enough hassle over its restaurant awards; imagine if they demanded that wineries sent a cheque and/or a case of wine with the samples; there would be outcry. Yet wine competitions do that and nobody seems to mind.

Thank you all for your input. I have also been in touch with some of the wine judges of various wine competitions - some with more rigorous standards than others. Factoring in everyone's input together into one pile, I can equate the whole idea of the presence of sweepstakes or other award-winning wine labels to one person's friend yet another's foe. This will make for an interesting conclusion in my thesis and would illustrate reasons for the dichotomous perception wine competitions have.