Judging in Wine Competitions is harder than it sounds. \u00a0Recently I was invited to be on the panal for the II Concurso Oficial de Vinos PROAVA 2017, <\/b>which\u00a0<\/b>took place over three days in late March, in the wine tasting rooms at the University Polytechnic of Valencia. More than two hundred wines from the region of Valencia were tasted and evaluated by a judging panel of 22 people made up of journalists, wine educators, restauranteurs, sommeliers and representatives from the DO\u2019s of Valencia.\u00a0 A varied mix of people bringing different levels of experience to the panel.<\/p>\n
It was a blind tasting, which means that the judges did not know the name, the producer nor the price of any of the wines.\u00a0 The wines were judged on their colour, quality and intensity of aromas, quality and intensity of flavours and overall balance.<\/p>\n
When I see\u00a0 scores or medals awarded to wines I check to see if the judging was done blind.\u00a0 It gives much more credibility to the results.<\/p>\n
Each judge was in their own\u00a0 tasting cubicle with a tiny sink to spit the wines and lights with different levels of intensity to check the colours in the wine. As each wine was served the only information given was its reference number.<\/p>\n
The tasting took place in silence and after assessing each wine the score sheet was signed and collected.<\/p>\n
The first flight, a term used when grouping wines together,\u00a0 was made up of young whites. \u00a0 After a while it becomes quite hard work because most of the wines were fairly similar, apart from this that were obviously made from Moscatel, which, when well made, has a distinctive grape like aroma.\u00a0 Overall the quality was quite good.<\/p>\n
The next flights of wines were the young reds, this was the best part of the tasting. Here is where I have noticed that local winemakers really have improved the quality of their wines.\u00a0 Many wines had pleasant fruity character and were well balanced.\u00a0 Blending local grape varieties such as Bobal with Merlot or Tempranillo can work well.<\/p>\n
Then came red wines that had been aged in oak for up to six months followed by red wines that had been aged for longer.\u00a0 During this part of the judging there was more variation of quality and styles.\u00a0 Some wines were elegant, well balanced with nice fruit and other flavours you find in wines aged for longer periods in oak barrels.<\/p>\n
However, there were also many wines that were totally out of balance where the winemaker had not overwhelmed the wine with the oak..\u00a0 This is notable when a wine tastes of mouldy wood or where the wood dominates\u00a0the fruit of the wine and only tastes of wood. \u00a0 Ageing wine is oak barrels is supposed to add complexity and flavour to the wine, there is a skill in doing this well.<\/p>\n
Tasting wines and being unaware of what it is or what it costs is something that I encourage wine enthusiasts to do because you learn to find the wine styles that work best for you and also trust your judgement rather than being influenced by a famous name or a high price.\u00a0 It is always very interesting afterwards when the bottles are revealed and you see what the wines are and the price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Judging in Wine Competitions is harder than it sounds. \u00a0Recently I was invited to be on the panal for the II Concurso Oficial de Vinos PROAVA 2017, which\u00a0took place over three days in late March, in the wine tasting rooms at the University Polytechnic of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[281],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7108"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7108"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8832,"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7108\/revisions\/8832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markoneill.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}