3 Days, 1300 Wines. InterVin 2013
Purple tongues & sore teeth. Our story of Judging at InterVin.
When we told friends we were headed to Niagara for three days to judge the InterVin wine competition, they didn’t feel sorry for us. When we insisted that tasting somewhere in the ballpark of 110 wines a day isn’t quite the walk in the vineyard it may sound to be, we still found cold hearts lacking of any sympathy.
Learning of the lack of love our nearest and dearest have for our jobs, we’re not going to try to convince you, here. However, we will say we began fortifying our teeth for the acid-onslaught days in advance, and still felt the electric pain of teeth rubbed raw after only Day 1 and still had to go back for more. So there.
We will raise a glass to Christopher Waters and the entire VINES Magazine crew who did a spectacular job keeping the competition organized and manageable, despite glass washer malfunctions and other minor disasters, dividing the 18 judges into crews of 3, each team taking on different wines to rate, debate, discuss and either toss or pass on to the last day when final round wines would parade in front of all the judges.
While judging certainly has its physical challenges for us, it’s a great exercise to line up wines, arguably of the same calibre and class, side by side and see what makes a wine great … and maybe what makes it fall short. It’s also a great experience to discuss it (sometimes at considerable length) with colleagues, present your point, listen to their’s, and then arm wrestle over who is right.
While there’s been some debate as of late as to the credibility of wine critics’ scores and the reliability of wine competitions, at the end of the day, we believe competitions help you, the consumer, sift through the rough to find the diamonds. As sommeliers ourselves, we’ve put our faith in colleagues we admire and we’re not ashamed to admit their high opinions of a wine has swayed us when it comes to our own purchases. Certainly, we have also found fantastic wines without awards and medals, but just like a gallery curator can help you discover a great piece of art, we believe wine judges and critics can help you zero in on a bottle you may not have previously considered.
From an entirely selfish perspective, it’s a fabulous education to get in the trenches, so-t0-speak, with fellow sommeliers, wine makers, writers and educators to find out what makes them tick, what they look for in a quality wine (our completely subjective and unscientific experience is that wine makers seem to judge wines by first ruling out flaws, then moving on to structure, and lastly considering flavour and nuance. Conversely, sommeliers take the opposite approach, looking first for aroma and flavour, then considering structure and finally thinking about flaws). Neither is necessarily right nor wrong, and we all get there eventually, but it’s fun to measure your tastes against other professionals’, and of you’re open to it (which hopefully everyone is), consider other points of view.
Results come out starting in September with the announcement of Best Value Wines, followed by silver and gold medalists. Finally, October 9 is the reveal date for top-scoring wines and Wineries of the Year.