Does winning awards influence how our wines are chosen? I am asked how I choose win for TheWinePlace.es and if it because they have been awarded high points or won prizes. Would you feel more assured if all the wines were gold medal winners? Sorry, but I do not select wines because of any points or awards they may have won, wines are chosen on their merits through lots of tastings. If the chosen wines happen to have awards then of course I will inform members.
Why don’t I follow the medals when making a new selection? For many consumers ‘points and awards’ give them reassurance before buying. All very understandable, but it is important to point out that, ‘points and awards’ are also a huge business generating profits for the competition organisers or the magazines. If, for example, a wine has won a gold medal and the publicity attached says ‘winner out of 6000 entries’, it sounds good.
However, looking at it from another perspective, the competition organiser has charged around €100 – €150 per product to enter and generated, do the numbers, a nice return on the event. So much so that they want more products to enter next year, and there are a lot of competitions, so it is important to give lots of prizes. Also, in certain publications there are strong links between some of the wines with the highest scores and the inches of advertising space.
Of course competitions have an important positive role to play in this worldwide industry that is so complex and fragmented that if awards make is easier for consumers to buy then that is a positive attribute. But don’t let this be the only criteria when buying your next bottle of wine.
