The judges are divided into panels of 5 people who taste flights of about 5-8 wines at a time. Each taster tastes, score and makes tasting notes on every wine, they then confer and award the medals to the wines. It is incredibly taxing, the wines are tasted totally blind, sometimes the panel chair will tell you a little about the wine region and vintage and sometimes you wont even know what the varietal is. The tasting is done standing up and we can taste between 50-100 wines a day. It is incredibly challenging but very rewarding experience.



The panel members are all experienced members for the wine industry; MW’s (masters of wine), oenologists, wine-buyers, journalists and disparate members of the wine industry from all over the world and all with a huge breadth of knowledge. For me it was a great place to learn from ones peers and discover wines that I would never usually see on a day-to-day basis. The fellow judges are also very friendly, curious to learn and always happy to impart their knowledge.

The judging is split into two sections, during the first week all the wine are tasted and judged whether to go onto the second round for medals, about half the wines are rejected at this stage, then in the second week the wines that made it through the first round are re-tasted and awarded their respective medals. This year we judged during the second week, as the first week was Pessach.
 




Several things struck me as I was tasting, the first was that some wine regions have become so regionalized in style that it is becoming very difficult to tell wines from different wineries apart. New Zealand is a prime example, their Sauvignon Blancs are becoming very difficult to tell apart, so too, for that matter are their Pinot’s. Some wines are being made to such an international style that it is becoming very difficult to distinguish countries let alone regions, Chardonnay is a good example of this.
Some part of me wonders how long it will be before all wines are made to a singular homogenous style. Portugal, for example, is making some really interesting wines which are defined by a very firm tannic structure that many of my colleagues called rustic, it will be interesting to see how long it will take to for these wines to lose their unique structure to one more accommodating of a fiercely competitive international market.





For those of you who wonder how we can taste wines all day long, well, firstly we spit out all the wines that we taste, secondly we are fed well during the day and lastly by the time we get home we are so tired that it is early to bed.
Those of you who know me know that I have quite strident opinions on wine competitions especially those in Israel but I will leave those opinions for another time, meanwhile, for the record, the only competitions that we still submit to are a couple in London.