Friday, May 23 2008
Judge Not ?
Justice stands tall. And shapely
I was at the Winemaker Magazine conference last week, when they announced the winners for the 2008 competition. 4321 entries! Wow! In doing the math Winexpert kit makers brought in a huge 271 medals. Happy indeed, and congratulations to all of those who entered. Putting your wine out for formal judging in a contest of your peers is a pretty bold statement of how you feel about it. According to Winemaker's site:
The 2008 edition of the WineMaker International Amateur Wine Competition once again represented the largest and most diverse collection of amateur wines ever assembled. In fact, this year's competition also was the largest wine competition of any kind - commercial or amateur - in North America. The 4,321 entries arrived from hobby winemakers living throughout North America in over 48 American states and 8 Canadian provinces and as far away as Australia, Italy and Israel.
I remember back to the first Winemaker competition, before I was banned from entering (although I'm not a professional winemaker and thus should be eligible to enter, some folks felt I had an unfair advantage. I dunno what it might be since all I do is make the kits according to the instructions, but they've instituted the Tim Vandergrift rule ever since). I entered 19 wines and scored 16 medals and wound up Winemaker of the Year. It felt awfully weird, but I was happy as a Sally Field--they liked my wine! They really, really liked it!
If you are interested in entering your wines into competition, the time to start is right now--for two years from now. The only real advantage I might have had over other competitors was the depth of my cellar. When you've got eight or nine thousand bottles of wine on hand, it's no big deal to age a bunch for three or five years before you try them, and that's the magic ingredient for quality, time, so you need to make wine today to let it age enough to show well in a couple of years.
Tomorrow: a primer on winning ways for wine competition.
| Posted by Tim AT 7:14PM | 0 Comments |  |
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