It’s a scene unlike anything most people have ever seen (including many in the wine industry)—a ballroom with a dozen or so tables, four or five places set at each table, and up to a dozen filled wine glasses at each place at the table. Over the next two or three days, people will sit at those places to swish, sip, and spit, tasting hundreds of wines. The goal is as daunting as the process: to distinguish the best wines from the plonk, rewarding the best with gold and platinum medals.
This happens hundreds of times a year, not only in the United States but also in Europe, Australia, South Africa, and almost anywhere else wine is made. It raises one of many intriguing questions about wine competitions in the current century: how did something that started more than 150 years ago as a way to show off agricultural products turn into a wine-industrial complex that seems to have a life of its own? Today, there is a competition for almost every kind of wine, every kind of appellation, every kind of judge, and every kind of winemaker.
Those who pay attention to wine competitions, including judges, organizers, and marketers, say that the reasons for this evolution are complicated. It was partly the result of wine’s growing popularity from the late 1980s through the recession in the mid-2000s, when competitions seemed to beget ever more competitions. And it was partly because of the increased recognition of wine’s various—and developing—constituencies, and especially those wine regions outside California and France. Another factor was the wine industry’s reluctance to market its product like other consumer goods. To draw attention, it was cheapest and easiest for a winery to enter a competition and parade the medals. Today, however, competitions don’t have the market impact they once did.
“There’s no doubt wine competitions aren’t what they were,” says Mark Chandler, the chief judge for the wine competition at the California State Fair, one of the oldest and most important in the US. “It has been almost two generations since that was the case. Younger consumers would rather get a text from their friends about what to drink than look up what wines got medals. And we have to find a way to change that.”
Wine competitions are influential around the world. Some of the most significant are the Decanter World Wine Awards, in London; the TexSom International Wine Awards and the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, in the US; the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, in Belgium; and the Sydney Royal Wine Show and the Melbourne Royal Wine Awards, in Australia. The results of these competitions are used to market wine, elucidate less appreciated wines from less appreciated regions, and highlight wines that can serve as a standard for other wines.
“Wineries enjoy the cachet of winning top awards at prestigious wine competitions, because it provides yet another ‘proof point’ to share with consumers about that wine,” says Denise Clarke, a Texas wine marketer. “Consumers also like to get the validation that wines they like also did well in wine competitions. Those awards give them confidence they have selected a good wine.”
There are perhaps as many as 500 wine competitions worldwide, based on best guesses from people interviewed for this story, but it’s difficult not only to compile a list of them but to compare them. The Australian competitions, for example, are paramount in their country, yet the results are little known elsewhere. The California State Fair is a must for California producers, but the competition doesn’t include any wineries outside the state. Even important international competitions, such as TexSom and Decanter, have their own quirks that can make a comparison of results challenging, such as differences in how the judges are selected or in the criteria used to rate the wines.
There are also dozens of regional and specialized wine competitions around the world that may help smaller producers sell wine and determine how to improve their products but pale in comparison with bigger competitions. The Colorado Governor’s Cup Winemaking Competition, held in Denver, and the International Cold Climate Wine Competition, held in Minnesota, are crucially important to wineries in Colorado and to those who make wine in cold climates, but they aren’t significant to a consumer in Madrid or Cape Town.
In one respect, though, wine competitions have never been about the consumer. Rather, their focus was on grapegrowers and the winemakers and acknowledgment of their work. Wine competitions were a way for wine producers to show off their products, much like producers of any other product in a competition at a county fair.
A historical record of the history of the Australian Royal Agricultural Society of New South Wales, for example, notes: “The Agricultural Society of NSW was founded in 1822 to improve the practice of agriculture in the Colony and offer suitable rewards and marks of distinction to persons excelling in different branches of agriculture. . . . In 1826 the Society ran its first wine competition at what was its fourth annual Show. A small gold medal was offered ‘to the Cultivator who produced the best sample of Colonial Wine, not less than ten gallons, certified on oath to be from the vintage of 1826, and purely of the juice of the grape.’”
This may well have been the world’s first wine competition; the historical record is vague, and there is no record of the winner of that Australian event. But some form of competition may have existed much earlier. The 13th-century poem “La bataille des vins” (The Battle of the Wines) describes a competition among 70 wines.
What’s more certain is that the first competitions in Europe started in the mid-19th century, “in the context of the World’s Fairs, the first of which took place in London in 1851, ” according to a history of world expositions. The initial International Exposition was held four years later in Paris, after the French emperor Napoleon III had established the 1855 Bordeaux Classification. This, by one account, was the centerpiece of the agricultural exhibits. A second show, in 1867, also displayed French wine.
The first US wine competitions date to the mid-19th century as well, with the California State Fair asserting that it held the first competition, in 1854. The Los Angeles County Fair (today the Los Angeles International Wine Competition) held its first event in 1935.
The modern wine competition era likely started with a handful of competitions in the 1980s, which included the Dallas Morning News Wine Competition (now TexSom), in 1984; the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition (originally the Cloverdale Citrus Fair Wine Competition), in 1983; and the Pacific Rim International Wine Competition, in 1985. There was also the International Wine Challenge in London, in 1984, and the International Wine and Spirit Competition, also in London, which evolved in the decade after 1970 from a small, private tasting into a major world event.
Becky Murphy, who started the Dallas Morning News event, says she was inspired after judging in a California regional competition in 1982 that featured what she saw as more professional management and more qualified judges. Many of the new competitions also expanded their entries, accepting wines from across the US and around the world.
Decades of stunning growth followed. The Riverside International Wine Competition began in 1982 as a branch of the California State Fair system, spun itself off about a decade later, and is today called Dan Berger’s International Wine and Cider Competition. The Concours Mondial de Bruxelles started in 1994, the Decanter World Wine Awards in 2004, and the Sunset International in 2012. This is to name only a few.
Yet trying to chart how and why wine competitions became so important is not straightforward. First, there’s little evidence that anyone saw a reason to keep track of the history of something that didn’t seem to be particularly historical. It’s also notable that competition officials are often reluctant to talk about their business, whether it’s regarding how competitions have evolved, which are the most important, the finances (including profits and donations to charity), the number of entries, or the intricacies of judging. A Decanter spokeswoman, for example, didn’t respond to repeated requests for an interview about its wine awards, and many who were interviewed hesitated to discuss much beyond the basics of their events.
“I think a lot of that reluctance has to do with the wine business and the idea that they don’t want to give anything away to other competitions,” says Rich Cook, who runs the late Robert Whitley’s Wine Cellar Productions (Critics, Winemaker, and Sommelier Challenge, San Diego International Wine Competition) and is director of the Toast of the Coast Wine Competition and the Monterey International Wine Competition.
The Covid-19 pandemic magnified the changing landscape, in which competitions had less influence and questions about judging quality and standards, and the demographics of those who judged, emerged. Pandemic restrictions shuttered many, if not most, competitions in 2020; even afterward, in many places there was hesitation about resuming competitions.
To the surprise of many, the world didn’t seem to miss them. Entries in many competitions, including some of the most prestigious, declined precipitously. The California State Fair entries have dropped by almost half relative to their pre-pandemic high, and judges and organizers report significant declines elsewhere. A drop in entries can be devastating, since the entry fees cover many of the expenses of a competition.
“A few years ago, there was an explosion of new competitions, but there seems to be a winnowing out now,” says James Tidwell, MS, who oversees the TexSom trade and education organization as well as its competition. “I think a lot of them thought this was a good way to make money, but you don’t make a lot of money running a wine competition, if any at all. You’re lucky if you cover your costs.”
While some competitions were paused for a year or two because of the pandemic, others are no longer held.
“Going two years without holding a competition is a long time,” says Tim McNally, who is based in New Orleans and has both judged and staged wine competitions. “How are you going to bring back the people and the interest if you haven’t had a competition?”
But there were signs that the boom was ending long before that, especially in the US. One indication of change came in the mid-2000s, with the collapse of local wine media. In the 1980s and 1990s, most major US cities were served by newspapers that had a wine columnist or critic who regularly wrote about wine competitions. This is one reason why so many competitions were affiliated with newspapers. In Dallas, for example, the Dallas Morning News ran a special section with its competition winners, and local retailers set up displays with the medal-winning wines. It wasn’t unusual to see customers wandering the store, special section in hand, grabbing medal winners. But most of those newspapers dropped wine coverage during the recession in their scramble to stay in business. Dallas, for example, no longer has a regular newspaper wine columnist.
While competition results can still sell wines (a Decanter platinum medal made a worldwide sensation out of a $6 Chilean Malbec in 2016), it’s not like it used to be, says Tim McDonald, who works in wine marketing and has judged and helped run several competitions. He explains, “That was how you marketed wines. You won a medal at a wine competition, the local wine guy wrote about the medal in his weekly column, and his readers went out and bought the wines. It was a win for everyone—the newspaper, the retailer, and the winery. I can’t tell you how much wine that sold over the years, all for the cost of an entry fee.”
Another challenge to competitions in recent years has been the debate over the quality of judging. How, asked many critics and wineries, can anyone make a fair assessment when they are tasting 100 or more wines a day? There were also complaints that many judges weren’t qualified; some competitions even used consumers as judges.
In 2023, the critic Sean Sullivan wrote, “Wine competitions have long been a dubious side of the industry,” and that there is “a strong whiff of pay-to-play, particularly as most every wine typically wins a medal.” His immediate example was the 2021 Sunset International Wine Competition, but he also commented on what he saw as inflated scores and too many medals across all competitions: “Giving medals to every wine is apparently no longer enough to ensure the submissions keep coming. Now the wines need stratospheric scores to go with those medals.”
This was not the first time judging came under attack. In 2013, Robert Hodgson, a winemaker and statistician, co-authored “Criteria for Accrediting Expert Wine Judges,” published in the Journal of Wine Economics. He claimed that wine judges, including some of the world’s best-known wine experts, were mostly unreliable. Using California State Fair data, he found that 17 of the 37 judges in the study were so inconsistent in awarding medals—they gave the same wine three different medals in one judging—that their ratings were statistically meaningless. Hence, “Wine competitions do not provide reliable recommendations of wine quality.”
Since then, various steps have been taken in competitions to ensure judging quality. In many, the number of wines tasted each day has been decreased from 100 to 80, and other reforms have also been adopted, including upgrading standards for being a judge and setting more specific guidelines for awarding medals. In 2023, the International Organisation of Vine and Wine, an intergovernmental wine trade group, revised its rules for sanctioning competitions, adding several pay-to-play safeguards.
Although some competitions and third parties offer judging certification, the results can be uneven. In my own 15 years of judging, I’ve witnessed this firsthand. Even certified judges make questionable statements and express personal bias.
The Australians, however, have the strictest requirements for judges, requiring everyone who judges to undergo the Advanced Wine Assessment Course run by the Australian Wine Research Institute. The goal of the course is to train judges to properly assess a wine and to justify their assessments.
Felicity Carter, an Australian wine journalist, explains, “The Australian wine show system came out of the agricultural show system, where the point was not just to recognize quality but to raise the overall quality of the sector. This is fundamentally different from many wine competitions elsewhere, which are primarily commercial exercises. Just as with judging cattle or dog trials, the Australian judges need to be experts who judge according to a common understanding of the matter at hand, so the results are consistent over time.”
Judging norms have begun to conflict with wine’s emerging demographic divide as well. Even at the most important events, many of the judges are still older white men, and the consumers who are the audience for the winning wines are not.
“Obviously, we’re very conscious of that,” says Tidwell. “You have to make the competition relevant and find a way to connect it to the wine market. And that means finding judges who are not on ‘the circuit’—the same ones who judge all the competitions. We didn’t want that, and so we’re definitely making an effort to find judges who are younger and aren’t white men.”
TexSom is not alone in this; most of the competition officials interviewed for this story made similar remarks. Likewise, the marketing materials for major events highlight the efforts most are making to ensure that their judges are younger and more diverse in terms of race and gender.
As one organizer said ruefully, however, “The more we try to make our judges more representative of the culture, the less the culture represents the wine market.”
This, perhaps, summarizes the challenges facing wine competitions as the wine business and the competition landscape continue to change. Most agree that competitions still have a role, but that role is increasingly unclear.
Some, such as Doug Frost, MS, MW, believe that smaller and regional competitions deserve more attention. Those, he says, are the only ones he still judges: “I think that competitions like the Colorado Governor’s Cup have more value for younger consumers who get their information from social media than a big competition with thousands of wines.”
Others, such as Chandler, insist that competitions should incorporate consumer education so that wine drinkers not only understand the process but can taste the wines and understand how the process works. At the California fair, for example, consumer classes featuring the winning wines are held. Chandler says, “Wine education like this has to become more important to the wine industry.”
Jay Bileti, an American Wine Society certified judge, who has judged at competitions in the US and Britain, says, “I don’t think there is any debate over why competitions exist: to provide exposure and marketing tools for producers.” He continues, “Gold medals and 90-plus scores apparently are valuable marketing tools. But a big misunderstanding is that a high score or gold medal is close to a guarantee that a person will like the wine. It isn’t. It’s a near guarantee that the wine is a good example of what the label says it is. You may like that wine, you may hate it.”
This hints at the changes that will be necessary for wine competitions to remain relevant to the wine industry. Implementing more rigorous judging standards and improving consumer education might elevate the role of competitions once again, but, ultimately, consumers will decide if awards are meaningful enough to influence what wines they buy.
International Organisation of Vine and Wine. “OIV Standard for International Wine and Spiritous Beverages of Vitivinicultural Origin Competitions.” Edition 2021. Accessed July 31, 2024. https://www.oiv.int/public/medias/7895/oiv-patronage-competition-norme-ed-2021.pdf.
National Diet Library, Japan. “Paris International Exposition and Wine Classification” in First Paris International Exposition of 1855: Napoleon III’s Ambition. Accessed July 31, 2024. https://www.ndl.go.jp/exposition/e/s1/1855-1.html.
O’Donnell, Ben. “The First Wine Competition?” Wine Spectator, May 31, 2011. https://www.winespectator.com/articles/the-first-wine-competition-44905.
Royal Agricultural Society of NSW. “Wine Competition History.” Accessed July 31, 2024. https://www.rasnsw.com.au/archives/competition-histories/wine/.
Sullivan, Sean P. “Wine Competitions Have Jumped the Shark.” Sean P. Sullivan Northwest Wine Report, April 17, 2023. https://www.northwestwinereport.com/2023/04/wine-competitions-have-jumped-the-shark.html.
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