I completely agree with you. Gold medals from a state fair (or similar event) and completely worthless -- even as an indicator of potential quality. After tasting many "Gold Medal Winners", I have come to believe that there is absolutely no correlation between the awards received and what I perceive to be the quality of the wine.

Thad,

While there are many problems with wine competitions, this report has been roundly dismissed. I have been on a bit of a judging hiatus the past two years (one year because of parenthood and one fighting cancer). Prior to that, I participated in around 10 competitions per year in addition to those we conduct with Wine Press Northwest.

The main problem with many wine competitions is the quality of judges. Most winemakers, for example, are not good judges. Many tend to see problems that do not exist (at least for the rest of the panel). Some competitions have reputations for giving out a lot of medals. The worst are open walk-around "competitions" at festivals, which end up being popularity contests.

I will say this: It is very difficult to get a gold medal at top judgings. Those that accomplish this tend to be very special wines indeed.

Dismissing all judgings because of a specious study and a few crummy competitions is similar to writing off a region because of a bad vintage or a winery because of a batch of corked wines.

Andy, thanks for your perspective on this important topic. I appreciate your opinion here, especially knowing your experience judging wine competitions.

While I agree there are those medal competitions that do an effective job evaluating wine, there are countless county/state fairs and other events that do not meet the bar. Academic research aside, the pay-to-medal approach and poor judging overall has unfortunately tainted all medal competitions.

It's like baseball, cycling or other sports that have been juiced for too long by steroids. Sure, there are clean players, but the entire sport is now tainted, losing credibility amongst fans who once believed that athletes were playing by the rules. Where records were broken, asterisks now remain. It's time to start putting some asterisks on wines garnering medals from certain competitions.

My advice to those holding credible wine competitions is to go after those events that are tainting the entire group. It's time for some self-policing here amongst organizers so that the entire category of wine judging is cleaned up.

Until this is cleaned up, I have suspicions about any wine that received a medal, county/state fair or otherwise.

While I don't disagree with your premise that local wine competitions are of dubious merit, the vehemence with which you present your views, the degree to which you generalize, and the extremism with which you command wineries to obey your proclamations are out of scale to the subject matter. A little less rant and more information, more facts, more analysis, would be of more value to this reader.

Pinot Lover, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic as well as your feedback on the approach taken by me in this post.

While I do not deny the vehemence of my views, I do take issue with your suggestion that I am practicing "extremism" by issuing a "command" to wineries that they "obey" my guidance. Note that in my first paragraph, I merely requested wineries "please stop this practice immediately" - just a clear, concise and courteous request to stop insulting consumers with the promotion of money-for-medals awards.

I am not alone in making this request, as there are other folks out there doing the same. Also, my intent is not so much to plead with wineries to stop this practice, as it's designed to inform consumers to beware of those producers who attempt to stand on these awards as a means toward proclaiming their wine is good, if not superior in some way.

Whether wineries realize the error of their ways is no matter to me, however, I stand by my conviction that consumers should be made aware of the "dubious merit" of these types of awards. In fact, it probably would have been more appropriate to suggest that all wineries promoting medals disclose the methodologies associated with their wine's awards

Full transparency is a good course of action here, as it would ensure those competitions that are reputable do not suffer as a result of those who are clearly dubious (please see my response to Andy Perdue's comment above). If a winery is going to proclaim their wine a gold medal winner with each pour, then they should fully disclose the methodology behind the competition.

As to the scale of this issue, I see the promotion of county/state fair medals in tasting rooms in my region quite often. In fact, it goes beyond adorning bottles with bling, for there is a common practice of including mentions of wine medals with each pour. I find this practice common at tasting events such as Taste Washington, where folks whose wines aren't even close to being drinkable, proudly proclaim some random fair where their wine won a medal.