Need your help! What wine competitions are important to you?

WINE TALK
1

Everyvine (http://www.everyvine.com) is compiling a list of current and past wine competitions and we need your help.

At the site we have been getting a lot of requests from vineyard and winery owners about wine competitions. They want to add awards won at wine competitions to their wine profiles on Everyvine. The wine profiles are important because they impact vineyard ratings. For that, and several other reasons (read this blog post if interested: http://www.everyvine.com/2012/09/26/which-wine-competitions-matter/), I have been working on compiling a complete list of current and past wine competitions. I thought it would be easy, but after weeks of searching I wasn’t able to find a complete list anywhere.

So, on Everyvine I have published a list of all the wine competitions I could find reference to as well as contact and other details for the event organizers. Here is a link to the list:
http://www.everyvine.com/wine-competitions/

Because this list will guide what awards vineyard and winery owners can add to their wines I want it to be as complete as possible. Therefore, if you have some spare time and are feeling generous, would you please review the list? If you see a missing competition you can let me know here:
http://www.everyvine.com/wine-competitions/missing-wine-competition/

Finally, thought I might reach out to you all for an informal poll. I find myself wondering about the impact of wine competitions. Which wine competitions are important to you? It seems to me that all competitions are not created equal and I would like to get a sense for which ones are the top influencers.

Thanks for any insights.

2

none.

3

I use competitions even less often than critics ratings (and those I use almost never!)

4

None.

I have never made a wine purchasing decision based on a wine competition award. I honestly have no clue whether any wine I have prized, or any wine I have in my modest collection, have won any award.

Well, on reflection, I do have a couple wines that won the Spectator Wine of the Year award, but that’s a negative to me. Price goes up on a wine I already knew I loved.

5

Think Glenn L e v i n e is our resident expert on wine competitions, he may have even won a medal for his contribution.

6

I think this is the wrong forum to ask. I think the general public would make buying decisions seeing medals on wines (even though there are a million competitions out there that give silver, gold, double gold and triple gold) and I doubt they give two shits about which competition is getting the medals… only that there are medals.

7

+1 to ‘None’ and to CFu’s comment. I remember noticing that some of Barefoot’s first releases prominently featured a medal on their bottles, even though it was for label design… In my experience, non-savvy consumers just don’t care, and realization that competition results don’t mean anything is usually a very early step on the way to becoming more knowledgeable.

8

None is my answer also and was reinforced by a blog post recently by a winemaker who wrote that she was pleased to win a handful of medals at a recent competition until scanning the list of winners and saw a Gallo box wine had won a gold medal.

9

You left out:

Central Coast Wine Competition (combining the county fairs of all counties from San Jose to Oxnard) held every hear in June (http://centralcoastwinecomp.com/)

Mid Americn Wine Competition held every July and open only to the wines of the Mid-West. (see http://www.midamericanwine.org)

I run both of these, so if you have any questions please contact me.