Wine competition

A wine competition is an organized event in which trained judges or consumers competitively rate different vintages, categories, and/or brands of wine. Wine competitions generally use blind tasting of wine to prevent bias by the judges.

The common goal of all wine competitions is to obtain valid comparisons of wines by trained experts. Wine competitions can vary widely in their characteristics, and are sometimes geared toward a specific audience (i.e., consumers vs. industry professionals). One of the ways wine competitions can vary is how the wines are ranked. In most competitions, medals are given to individual wines in various categories on the basis of the blind tasting. The awards are frequently bronze, silver, gold, and double gold medals. In other competitions, ribbons of various colors are sometimes used. In these competitions, it is common for more than one wine to receive any given medal. These competitions often also include a "Best in Class" award, producing a clear category winner among those vintages awarded any particular medal, as seen in the Los Angeles International Wine & Spirits Competition, the New York International Wine Competition, and The Decanter World Wine Awards. In still other competitions, instead of giving numerous awards, the wines in each wine category are ranked by number from high to low, a process known as ordinal ranking. In these competitions, there is only one first-place winner, one second place, one third place, and so on down to the lowest place. It should be noted that medal rankings are different from the 100 point scales that are used by many journalistic publications, such as Wine Spectator. These "scores" are obtained when wine journalists blind taste the wines and score them on an individual basis, as opposed to when the wines are being tasted side by side and competing against one another in a competition setting.

There are critics who argue that the results of such competitions may be misleading and should not be relied upon as a measure of quality. Other commentators argue that, because of wine competitions, wine quality has improved in many countries around the world.

An "international" wine competition is a competition that accepts wines from all over the world. Competitions are generally held in one location and winemakers must ship their wines to the competition in order to be considered. There is generally an entry fee for winemakers to enter their wines into the competition. Below are some examples of top international wine competitions:

Some wine competitions only accept wines from a specific region or appellation. Sometimes this is because they are newer and don't have the resources to manage or hold a large number of entries from outside of their region, but most often it's because the organizers want to draw attention to their specific winemaking region. Some examples of local competitions are:

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