Alex Dale has decided not to put his wines into competitions. We asked him to explain why.

Why don’t I enter? Now there’s a question that requires me to breathe in deeply before responding....

I have, over the 22 years since my first harvest in Burgundy, witnessed so much cynicism and opportunism with competitions, medals etc, that when I started to work for myself some five years ago I decided that I simply wasn’t interested in all that hype and its rather mercenary spiral. It’s not that I’ve been disappointed or my pride’s been hurt by poor results, I simply don’t enter competitions.

I have, however, judged on numerous occasions (according to the letters I get from the International Wine Competition in London each year I’m now a senior judge – but that’s another story). I’ve tasted in ‘expert’ groupings and served on panels, for various publications, here and overseas. So I have a certain perspective of how these events work – or not, in some cases.

How many times have I witnessed people with little knowledge being included in panels, where their unqualified opinions sway results ? It’s even happened to me, when I’ve been called in to judge something I have some knowledge of and suddenly I’m pulled into also judging a whole different category about which I know next to nothing. That’s one reason why I walked out of two panel (blind) tastings for a certain South African wine publication and haven’t gone back since. My vote was one of only four or five, on one occasion, for wines I had no business to be judging.

What about the producers who crave medals and rely heavily on them to sell their product ? One winery I used to work for won an amazing accolade in France. I refused to order the stickers and sold the wine on its own merits. After I left, someone got the stickers and put them on the bottles. That’s fine – except that the wine had moved on a vintage and the wine that was carrying the stickers had never been anywhere near the competition… But did it sell better!

Judging by an article in the Australian Sunday Mail on 30 May this year, such practices are far from isolated. I quote :

Experts are also worried that medal-winning wines may not actually be what ends up in our glasses.
    Some producers reportedly enter carefully selected batches in shows and then attach ‘medals’ on blended batches of lesser quality.

It goes on to cite an outraged Brisbane cellar owner:

I did an experiment where I stuck ordinary gold stickers on bottles of wine. They sold faster,’ he said. ‘Wine shows were created as a way of producers measuring themselves against their peers and they fulfil an important function for producers.’

Now they were a marketing ploy and not always a good consumer guide. 

Medal-winning styles

Then there are the styles of wines that seem to so often stick out in competitions; they just don’t interest me. Flashy wines on steroids, which will be noticed in the sterile, over-crowded environment in which many competitions need to be judged. They’re often the sweeter, oakier, more extracted and powerful wines. I call them spitting wines: highly ‘impressive’, but which you just can’t drink (especially with food – and wasn’t food created to make wine taste better?). In other words somewhat pointless wines, other than to obtain medals, of course.

They stand out like the big-breasted blonde wearing scant but brightly-coloured clothes in a contest where the declared goal is personality. But where the judges just can’t keep their eyes off her tits.

What use is, for example, a chardonnay or chenin blanc competition where the winner invariably tastes more like the barrel it was made in than the variety it is supposed to represent, let alone its area of origin or even the vintage? ‘Oh, that tastes like a fine new Dargaud & Jeagle barrique, medium toast. I bet it’s Allier oak…! Gold. Well done.’

Or a shiraz with 15 or 16 degrees of alcohol, a residual sugar level of 5 grams per litre, and enough new oak to build a ship to deliver it anywhere in the world. Trophy, bravo! Try actually drinking a bottle, unaided.

Commercialism

Many of the major international competitions are commercial ventures. In fact, which ones aren’t these days? The owners of the competitions, as well as sometimes getting  lucrative sponsorship or advertising, tend to sell:

1.  Entry fees: usually charged for each wine entered in each category. A great incentive to encourage as many wines as possible being entered, to create lots of categories, and making sure a high proportion of entrants gets some form of commendation (and none getting exposed as losers).

2.  Stickers for the medal winners. Who doesn’t order these when they’ve won something decent? And another motivation for the competition owners to give out loads of medals.

Many competitions are linked to wine publications, which are often incentivised in one manner or another by the competitions’ success and thus act as mouthpieces for the competitions. Squaring the virtuous cycle: medal, press, retailer, consumer.

Now, if competitions were non-profit events, where entrants paid only to cover realistic actual costs and where only, say, 10% of wines got medals, I’m absolutely certain that that would result in fewer competitions, fewer medals, and fewer wines entered. In other words, less money being spun.

Who would lose out? First of all the competition owners, obviously. Second, the courier companies which ferry the entered wines around the planet. Third, those less imaginative retailers who would have to find a new way of getting the selling done for them. Fourth,  magazines in an obvious way – not to mention the advertising revenue competitions and medals generate.

I think that the consumer, who is supposed to be the real beneficiary of these competitions, would be the least hard done by. And the alternative scenario I sketch above might well result in increased credibility for the remaining competitions and a far greater value for their medals (whether you like the style or not).

A beautiful concept?

Competition is good – no, it’s great. and I’m all for it. And it’s an Olympic year we’re in, of course. Wasn’t that a beautiful concept – initially? Sportsmanship, fair play, dedication, skill, personal achievement. Until money got involved – and medals meant money. Now it’s all commercialism and the sponsors who call the shots – and increasingly steroids and other drugs beefing up what are (underneath) anyway some very fine athletes. Sound familiar?

In an international market where there is a massive over-supply, opting to not enter the ‘competition vortex’ can and will mean excluding yourself from significant retail focus and positioning, from numerous glory events, press articles and so on. It really can make your sales performance hellishly difficult, especially for a young winery, and especially in today’s tremendously tough market. I know from experience that it’s a major handicap. So it’s really not advised.

I strongly (if naively) believe, however, that in the long run we will earn our followers and that people will buy our wines on purpose, repeatedly, but not because they may temporarily be glorified by a gold sticker. The consumer I’m after is hard to reach, though far less fickle and less volatile in the long run than the other kind. I simply do not want to be a wine producer if the ultimate purpose is to chase medals. That’s just not why we do what we chose to do.

How many of the world’s top quality producers enter such competitions or put stickers on their labels? I’ve not seen Domaine de la Romanée Conti, Château Margaux or any of the other greats do so. They don’t need to. So it’s up to the rest of us to either accept the protection racket that medals can often offer sales, or to brave the challenge and go it alone.

This article represents one person’s view of competition and medals, i.e. mine. It’s bound to cause me trouble and make some influential people not best pleased with me. But I’m happy to be the fall guy if it helps to stimulate a thought process leading to some band-wagon wine competitions falling by the wayside, to retailers starting to act more responsibly and only allowing  the stickers of accredited competitions on the bottles they stock (the System Bolaget in Sweden does this, I believe).

There are good competitions, scrupulously and professionally run, here and overseas, and they do have a valid role in wine retail and in wine appreciation. However, where there’s money involved, where there’s a structural global over-supply and where insufficient scrutiny is implemented, how on earth can we go on expecting competitions to be balanced, let alone objective? They should be regulated, for one thing. (The Enron saga in the USA is just one example showing just how far things can go when there’s no accountability for those supervising the game….)

I’ll finish with the first few lines of that Australian article I quoted earlier:

Wine-lovers beware – the award-winning bottle you’ve just opened may not be all it’s corked up to be.
    Consumers are being exposed to a plethora of gold, silver and bronze medals plastered across wine labels.
    But industry sources say many of the medals and other accolades are just clever marketing, tricking consumers into thinking the wine is better than it is.