That said, I am not at all surprised at the results of this research and the conclusions drawn.

If I’m interested (and I often am) in the consensus of a committee of tasters I’ll visit CT. Beyond that I find that WA, IWA & BH are reliable sources once you are familiar with the preferences and idiosyncracies of the various individual critics providing the TN and the resultant ratings.

One note here – we suffer from some cultural shortcomings in the United States that give our citizens less opportunity for proper training than you sometimes grow-up with in Europe. I see a trend towards education and consistency that will build over time, as more and more people in the US engage wine actively and get proper training in dealing with the rigors of judging many wines in one sitting.

For now though, certainly taking judging medals with a grain of salt is wise (unless you won the medal and it will help you sell your wine better of course!).

Do they not suffer from the same challenges – “where and when a wine is tasted in the line-up ( fatigue, tannin build-up on the palate in huge classes) and the personal style preferences of judges on specific panels.”

And does it therefore all just come down to a vehicle for marketing – getting your foot in the door etc?

Yes, yes and yes, I think.

I see references to medals in tasting rooms most often (Michigan, Canada). They’re of interest, but don’t affect my buying because, well, I get to taste and decide what I like. Retail, I buy wine I already know something about in the grocery store and I buy on recommendations in wine stores, where I’m usually looking for something I don’t know about.

I do most years, though, buy the best in class wines in the Michigan wine competition just to see if I agree with the judges.

The conclusions may be right, but not based on analysis of that data! I’m posting a piece on this tomorrow on my blog.

As a wine marketing guy, my responsibility is to sell wine. And in order to do that we have to get it on the shelf. Which means the retailer and the distributor are the real gatekeepers and arbiters of what options the consumer has in the first place.

So while medals might have little consistency or quantifiable accuracy, they do play a very simple, and very important role, of getting the wine on the shelf. This is especially true for wines from smaller producers that don’t have the leverage at the distributor or retail level. More often than not, a medal on a sell sheet is what makes the difference as to whether a wine makes it to the shelf.

So sure, medals may not be a reliable quality or value metric. But they do play a very important role on the commercial side. It may not be right, or fair, and may even be misleading to the consumer. But it is the way the system works.

And that being the case, wineries are pretty much required to enter as many competitions as they can, because a gold medal, even it’s from the local county fair, can be the difference between getting the wine in front of the consumer or not.

While judges might be in a better position to evaluate wines than many of the rest of us, they are not gods. And when you’re trying upwards of 50 wines at a time, even a god might have some challenges distinguishing the great from the good.

It’s true though, and most of your big macrobrews (that are flavorless and boring) bear titles like The King of Beers, The Champagne of Beers, The Banquet Beer, etc. Same thing happens with whiskey–there are some real rotgut whiskeys out there with labels covered in medals.

“Pabst Blue Ribbon.” And then I told him to talk to the shop owner and ignore the labels.

I will admit with full honesty that when I was just starting to purchase wine 12 years ago, I was often drawn towards wines with medals (which also happened to be fairly inexpensive), and would even point out the award to friends while pouring. “This got a silver at the Pocatello County Fair in 1993!”

There’s a lot of fear and nervousness among novice wine buyers–What if it’s awful? Did I just waste $15? If I hate it do I have to pretend that I like it? At the time I saw the medals as sort of validation, that the wine had passed some test of quality. Certainly that strategy worked well for PBR from 1893 to the 1950s.