John Glas wrote: ↑
Thu Jan 17, 2019 7:37 pm
Has anyone heard of most of these winners? I have never tasted any of them. The only thing worse than these winners is that the general public will pay $70 to taste this crap.
There are plenty of good wines poured at this event. Your crap comment is letting your inner wine snob show.
Blind tasting is the ultimate playing field leveler.
Brian I scrolled down on the link and the 2019 SFCWC BEST-OF-CLASS WINES: did not jump out at me. Am I missing something? While I am unfamiliar with many of the names I see Meiomi, Bogle, Castle Rock, Hook & Ladder, Robert Hall, Sutter Home and more. I don’t see $70 plus the processing fee worth of wines.
I’ve been BURNED one TOO MANY times on Wilfred Wong wine suggestions. I’m not sure if he still ‘works’ for BevMo…but his opinion…in MY opinion…SUCKS HARD!
He left them a few years ago. Works for wine.com now. I never understood his rankings either. But having met him a few times he’s actually a pretty decent taster and he’s a nice guy. Not sure what his deal with BevMo was - whether he was supposed to flog whatever they had or be honest.
The SF event seems a little weird. With that many judges, did they do score averages, total points, whatever? I mean it’s nice that they have some wine makers there, but if you’re looking at the judges - I’ve had the Paulsen wines, even visited their winery. I really wanted to like them because I liked Pat Paulsen, but the wines were sweet and horrible. If that’s what the winemaker likes, that’s what he’ll judge as good. No criticism of him, but it will skew his scores and I suppose that’s the case with most of these.
However, if you look at the wines, Brian is right - there will be a lot of wines besides the ten or so that are puzzling. The categories are weird - Syrah from 28 - 32 dollars, but whatever.
Our own Bob Foster was one ofthe judges. He said it is all blind and that he didn’t share the opinion of the Trump Sparkler. He said it was too citric/acidic.
Somehow I do not see myself buying sparkling or any other type of wine from the Trump Winery. In fact, I could see myself on the mailing list and buying Fait Main wines apparently at $175 a clip before I would be buying wines from Trump Winery.
Our own Bob Foster was one of the judges. He said it is all blind and that he didn’t share the opinion of the Trump Sparkler. He said it was too citric/acidic.
Yes I see many good wines. Thanks for the link. Yes I agree blind tasting does allow for some of the bigger names not to win.
This concerns me: A total of 65 professional judges evaluated each entrant over a weeklong period and also consumed plenty of olives, loaves of bread, rare roast beef and sparkling water along the way. How can any judge be accurate tasting 6800 wines over a weekend?
This is one of the largest wine competitions in the country, and it really does attract a wide variety of wines at all quality levels. It’s also a huge moneymaker for the organization that puts it on as you are charged for each wine that you enter into the competition.
Yes, it is done blind just like every wine competition is. That said, as others have pointed out, there are so many wines that are in this competition and that the judges try that it would be difficult to imagine that palates do not get thrashed.
What’s funny is that so many wineries tout these results, and so many consumers make audible ‘oohs and ahhhs’ upon the winemaker or tasting room person saying it. This does not happen when talking to potential on an off-premise accounts.
Indeed, these kinds of competitions can be an important sales tool for wineries that aren’t being covered by TWA or WS and rely almost exclusively on direct-to-consumer sales. There isn’t much fundamental difference in the eyes of the casual tourist between touting that a wine that won double gold at a major wine competition versus that it got 92 points from a wine newsletter they’ve never heard of. So what’s wrong with a small winery taking advantage of that?
Brian - spot on. There are a lot of solid, small wineries on this list that will never see distribution, ever, out of their home states, and plenty of larger ones that we e all seen (Coppola, A to Z), who would be surprised to hear their wines being called “crap”. Just because one hasn’t heard of a winery or seen it on WB or read its review in TWA doesn’t make it crap.
A to Z for what it is not crap. Maybe surprising would have been a better word choice. Again that many wines there will not be accurate results. Not sure why they don’t break this down with five judges doing Pinots, 5 doing Rhone wines, etc. 65 people trying to pick winners is a losing proposition.
Marc and Brian a big +1. I have attended the last two public tastings and there are way too many wines that most berserkers would be happy to drink/serve to try than I could taste. The biggest caveat is the event is not for the crowd adverse. Planning on going again this year if my work schedule allows it.
Nothing is ‘wrong’ when touting these successes, but to me, it is similar to ‘ratings’ - there are plenty of places where I could submit my wines t ok be ‘scored’ if my only intent was my belief that these scores somehow ‘correlated’ with ‘objective quality’ . . .
Oh, I agree with you there about the macro question, debated forever on this board, about the value to the consumer of scoring. But as a marketing tool, there is real value to the seller, whether it’s points or medals.
Marc and Brian a big +1. I have attended the last two public tastings and there are way too many wines that most berserkers would be happy to drink/serve to try than I could taste. The biggest caveat is the event is not for the crowd adverse. Planning on going again this year if my work schedule allows it.
If they are pouring all the Pinots I clicked on that alone would be worth it. I was just unimpressed with the big winners.
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