Because, apparently, they don’t want to embarrass the losing wineries. And they don’t think wine competitions are about, er, competition. And because they don’t think a consumer - who is supposed to trust the medals enough to buy wine - should want to trust the judges to NOT buy wine when no medal is won.
And because any wine can show poorly on any given day, so let’s not rub it in.
Help me out here. I prefer total transparency. I very much respect the work of Robert Whitley on his site, Wine Review Online, and I respect the work he has done to put together some of the strongest wine competitions in the country.
But read his words below regarding why he doesn’t list non-medal wines, and tell me what I’m missing.
"Someone wanted to know why we published the medal-winning wines, but not the wines that failed to impress. To me, the answer is obvious. The medal-winning wines are the recommendations of the professional judges who evaluated the entries. Publishing the names of wines that failed to win a medal might unnecessarily embarrass the winery that submitted the entry. Nobody is served by that.
Wines that fail to win a medal are not necessarily bad wines. No doubt some were poorly made, but in many cases, a wine simply doesn’t perform well because it’s going through a stage of its evolution that is not particularly flattering. Young wines are like that. Sometimes the fruit shows, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the tannins seem to be supple and nicely integrated; sometimes they are hard or aggressive.
As the Twitter query unfolded, the question of the consumer benefit came up. Wouldn’t it be useful — the question was asked — if the consumer knew all of the wines entered to better understand the framework of the evaluation? Good question. It would be useful if the wine competition were a horse race: with one winner, a second-place finisher, and so on through the entire field of horses.
That’s not how a wine competition works. At the wine competitions I manage (five major international events) and those I have judged, such as the Concours Mondial in Brussels, each wine is treated as a stand-alone entity and evaluated on its merits. The wines only “compete” if they advance to what my wine competitions call the “sweepstakes” round, where best of class and best of show awards are determined.
At that point, a wine has already received whatever medal the judges believe it deserves. In theory, a gold-medal wine should be of a certain quality whether there were 300 wines or two wines entered in its class. Wines are not graded on a curve, so the “framework” question is irrelevant.
The benefit to the consumer, of course, is that he or she can piggyback the preferences of well-qualified wine judges when making wine-buying decisions. The Sommelier Challenge is judged exclusively by professional sommeliers. All of the Sommelier Challenge results are available on the web at SommelierChallenge.com."