Year in the Vineyard Blog, Week #10, wherein Wes travels to the LA International Wine Competition in Pomona, CA, and discusses wine evaluation and whether it is necessary in the Web 2.0 world. I plan to run a second part of this blog with pictures, hopefully tomorrow. It's a bit stream-of-consciousness this week, as is appropriate coming from a cranium soaking in 229 wines from the last 48 hours.

My wife Chanda and I left Tuesday morning to drive down to Pomona for my 12th year as a judge at LA International Wine and Spirits Competition. In that time I'm made some very good friends in the wine business, and I always look forward to seeing all these folks who I catch up with only once a year. Some are Napa veterans, some are legends in CA wine history, some are famous winemakers from the Midwest (yes, there are famous Midwestern winemakers), while others are writers, importers, retailers, distributors, Master Sommeliers and collectors. LA invites judges from all over the world, and I always learn more from this group of winos than any other group I've ever hung out with. And we drink-we drink a lot between the evaluating and spitting, and as any frat dude will tell you, drinking friends quickly become very good friends.

Tuesday night dinner: After checking into the Pomona Fairplex Sheraton Tuesday, we took a short respite before heading down to the patio for our Judges' Welcome Dinner. The food included fresh shrimp off the grill, oysters, fabulous grilled vegetables and lovely artisan beets and a large selection of gold medal wines from previous years. Judges trickle in and get reacquainted with their compatriots, and the conversations usually center around family and business before the food and wine become the focus.

Wednesday judging:
Our panel consisted of a wine grower (me), Stacie Hunt (wine writer, certified sommelier and broadcaster from NPR), Chuck Keagle (restaurateur, owner of Cask and Cleaver Restaurants), and one of my judging mentors, Dr. Fred Nury (Professor Emiterus of Enology at Fresno State). It's common to balance winemakers, academics, writers and retailers to have various perspectives on a panel-but the balance of our panel this year was extraordinary. We all have good palates-Fred has the most experience, Chuck knows what sells well in restaurants and what matches with food, Stacie brings the perspective of a Somm and the media, and I try to provide a farmer's frame of reference. They talk about the wine, I may talk about how the wine speaks of its vineyard origin and cultural practices, good and bad.

Wednesday we went through about 110 wines. The first 35 were 2006 Syrahs and Shiraz (the same varietal), the first half were under $15 and the latter were $30 and spendier. The cheaper wines are usually easier to taste-lighter in style and less weight, ripeness and oak. We found some nice wines with the characteristic black berry fruits and white pepper, and even sent a wine up for Sweepstakes. Gamay was next-two wines really weren't Gamay like, and the last was a blockbuster-rich, grapey, hints of earth and perhaps even a carbonic-maceration brightness. It was spot on and we gave it a big fat gold. Then came the Lemberger (only 2), a light hybrid varietal more common in Canada. I was left unimpressed. Then we moved along to non-barrel Chardonnays (60 of them).

We gave a few golds, but none of the wines moved us to a Sweepstakes nomination. I will say the quality of less expensive Chardonnays have improved significantly in the decade or more I have been judging here. We used to toss out over half of the wines from medal contention-many by nose alone, but the modern wine industry has really cleaned up their act and their wines, where it is almost uncommon to find a wine not deserving of a medal. After the Chards we had enough time and tooth enamel left to dig into a few dozen Muscats-from dry to sweet to orange to some hybrids, Muscat is really easy-it's either deliciously aromatic or its boring-usually a gold medal or a no award. The sweeties were a nice way to finish up, and we went back to the hotel and then out to go see the new Star Trek flick and have dinner. A Laker win over Denver made the night a complete success.

Thursday: The same panel convened at 8:30 sharp to get through 50 merlots, mostly $15 and under. The sub-$15 Merlots were a revelation. The 2007 West Coast Merlots are some of the best inexpensive wines I've tasted en masse. We gave oodles of gold medals, and silver medals were as common as bronzes. The wines caused us, as a panel, to stop for a few minutes and discuss why the wines were so much better than in years past. My theory was that Merlot fruit in the North Coast is a tough sell now in the post-Sideways wine market. Because high quality merlot fruit is available for low cost, and for the fact that many of these wines have seen a reduction in price, these low-end to mid-range merlots exhibit incredibly good value. After the Merlots we had a number of ‘dry red blends'-many were good, many were bretty and bad, and many showed good balance for drinking.

Tomorrow (Friday): We do the ‘Sweepstakes' round-around 30-40 of the best wines of the competition will be tasted. We'll taste the best of each category, i.e. the best Pinot Grigio or the best Rhone blend, and then vote for the best white, red, sparkling, dessert, etc. From those we will vote on the best wine of the show. It's usually red.

What I look for in a Gold Medal wine:

• Enticing aromatics that lure me into the glass
• An ‘attack' in the mouth that is balanced between fruit, intensity, acidity and enough elegance to make it useful at table. I will eliminate an overly ripe wine faster than a ‘thin' wine. Noticeable heat in the finish = no medal in my book unless it's a fortified wine. These are mostly very young wines, and if a wine is so hot that it shows alcohol through the wine's baby fat, that's poor craft in my wine world.
• Lack of noticeable flaws-the wine should smell, taste and drink wonderfully.
• Either flavors that show proper varietal character or a wine so unique that it makes me reevaluate what a varietal can do.
• Flavors that show proper farming/cultural practice. From my perspective, great aromatics are created in the field and retained by competent winemaking. Green wines or flaws from farming are my pet peeve, and I tend to jump all over them at panel.

Why should Pros Evaluate/Judge Wine: Good question!  Here are the arguments I can conceive:

• ‘Sea of mediocrity' argument. There are so many bad wines made in the world, that the pros are doing the hard work to find the gems and keep you from the ‘schwag'. This is changing, and changing quickly. Back when wine buyers were flush with cash (the good old days, 2006), you could get away with making a decent wine, or even occasionally a bad wine. Today the wheat is separated from the chaff almost violently in the tightening market. Good wineries are going out of business with the bad-but the pressure is on to produce and present good, clean wines from sound fruit. The wines I've tasted at the 4 judgings I do annually have improved incredibly in the last 10 years.
• Make a level playing field for the craft of winemaking. Imagine that anyone could send a song or a CD into Rolling Stone and have it reviewed. That's how wine works. If you can make wine commercially, you can send it into the Wine Spectator and have it scored, or send it to LA International and have it assessed/medaled. It's a great way to beef up the marketing materials-and I've found that a Gold Medal from a good competition can sell more wine than a 90+ score from a magazine. A gold medal means that four wine professionals agreed that the wine was excellent-that means a lot more to me than one guy in a room giving a numerical score. Judges sometimes prefer fruit-driven wines with character they believe is appropriate, and sometimes the wines that get the best medals lack complexity, depth and soul. But often the wines are more food friendly than high 100-point scoring system wines. Most wine judges don't fall into the same trap as the Kingmaker critics-they are not lured predominantly by weight and concentration. Big wines suck at table, and a delicate wine that may not stand out in a cattle-call of 4 dozen bottles can be the best wine for a delicate piece of poached salmon.
• Provide a forum for winemakers to assemble and discuss the state of the industry and the state of wine craft. This is why I judge wine. Tasting with enologists, retailers, Master Somms and legends in the wine business is something that would take me months to plan and execute. My first panel (some 13 years ago) consisted of Dr. Fred Nury (Professor Emeritus of Enology, Fresno State), Dr. Richard Peterson (Google him, he's a freakin' wine God), his daughter Heidi Peterson-Barrett (Cab Goddess extraordinaire-an absolute rock star of Napa). I was a sub for an Italian judge that missed the plane and just finished John Beuchenstein's Davis course on wine evaluation. That was a trial by fire, and I was fortunate to have such supportive and kind gurus to lead me through my first few hundred wines. Plus: I don't get out much. All other times of the year I'm at the ranch growing pinot. So a few times in Spring, I go into a fugue of tasting that has to illuminate the wine world until the next Spring. The friendships and business contacts I make at these tastings are invaluable to my development as an elite wine geek.

A Serious Question: Nietzsche said: "All institutions foster mediocrity".

Does institutionalizing wine evaluation (by a competition or a magazine) produce wines that become stylistically bland and mediocre? There is no clear answer, but I'd like to hear other opinions. My belief is that yes, many winemakers use services like Enologix, which tinkers with a wine's chemistry to try to get it higher point scores. Yes-there is a lab that believes it has a formula for appealing to James Laube's or Robert Parker's palate. Now I've met both men and honestly believe that they promote wines that truly appeal to their own palates-BUT-to make a wine for one person's hermetic evaluation is blasphemy in the fine wine world. Let the vineyard sing, allow the wine to represent a time and a place instead of pushing a button on the McMatter Machine to make another Merlot McNugget.  If we allow the market to be dominated by wines so stylistically manipulated that they all taste the same, we will deserve the boring wines we end up with.  That means go out and buy something crafty and unusual!  And tell your friends to do the same.

And that brings us to the BIGGEST PROBLEM IN MODERN NEW WORLD WINEMAKING:
• Wine is evaluated in a system that has nothing to do with its final utility.
• What stands out in evaluation/judging/scoring is often big fruit, big concentration, big extract and often big alcohol. Magazines (using single tasters to score wines) seem to fall into this trap more than at panel-based Competitions, as wine pros are usually embarrassed to admit that they like wines with cult-level concentration. Wines scoring in the mid to high ‘90's' often include tasting terms like ‘opaque', ‘glass-coating color and glycerin', ‘dense and masculine', ‘impossibly rich', and the like. Bigger is better to many critics. But bigger doesn't play well at table or in the cellar.
• What I want at table has nothing to do with what gets big points. I don't want ultra-ripe, homogenized wine concentrate. That doesn't meld magically with the flavors of a nice piece of venison in a delicate pan reduction. I want elegance at table, a wine that gives me a seat in the middle of a vineyard where I can taste the vintage-the sun and wind, the fog and rain. I want a wine that is a time machine. Overt ripeness homogenizes terroir-winemakers know it and it's time we admit it.

The Blog is a little disorganized (and lacking purty pitchers) this week--as I've been sort of riffing on wine and judging as the week's progressed.  I hope to share some of the results of this competition with you when I get home, and post some pics that I can't download right now with the equipment I have. I hope you've enjoyed my ranting and the break from strictly viticultural prose. I also want to make sure it was clear that this Competition is a jewel of California Wine Culture, and that it is a trip I look forward to each year for the camaraderie, the wines, the food and to thoughtfully attempt to celebrate the best wines in the world with meaningful medal awards.