Bling sells wine, as attested by the shiny plethora of competition medals on bottles. And when producers start looking extra hard for ways of winning them, it leads a few down paths where the scrupulous don’t go.
Local wine competitions have had some embarrassing moments in recent years, when dubious practices were revealed, usually by accident, in relation to winners — leaving many to wonder how many remain undetected. Consider just the past few months. In November 2009 we heard that the Diners Club Young Winemaker of the Year was Clarence Reabow from Môreson, specifically for his Premium Chardonnay 2007. The problem was, winewriter Michael Fridjhon pointed out, that the youthful Reabow joined Môreson several months after the 2007 harvest, well after crucial winemaking choices had been made.
My respect for bank-related institutions is necessarily immense, but Diners Club’s reaction prompted a twinge of bemusement at its smug ignorance: “Although he might not have been there for the harvest,” said a spokesperson, “he was responsible for 12 months of maturation.” You have to love that “might” and pause in awe of the prizewinning responsibility of watching over the wine in barrel and tank and then triumphantly easing it — unscathed — into the bottle.
Diners Club has since been loftily silent, hoping the guffaws would cease. They’ve had a bad time of late with their awards. Last year a losing winemaker snitch sulkily reported that the winning wine for the senior Winemaker of the Year award was not available in the stipulated volume. No question about the wine itself, but the winner stepped down, showing a perhaps belated respect for the rules and an integrity not evident in 2007. The year before it was the complicated and iffy judging process that led to raised eyebrows and debate — until the organiser irritatedly declared that “correspondence from our side is now closed”, while the bizarre confusions were still being cheerfully questioned.
Breaking the rules
Unlike Diners Club, Wine magazine recently acted promptly when a false declaration was discovered and a winner in the Sauvignon Blanc Top 10 competition was stripped of its rating. The Havana Hills 2009 was found to have more sugar-sweetness in it than the rules prescribed — and more than the producer declared on the entry form.
As sugar levels play a role in the latest scandal too, it’s an issue worth explaining: the riper the grapes, the more sugar for conversion into alcohol. Not quite all the sugar is converted and various techniques (and occasional uncontrollable processes) lead to the finished wine having variable amounts of “residual sugar” — the Sauvignon Blanc competition, for example, allowed 5g a litre (the standard local definition of “dryness”), whereas the offender had 5,6g.
There was no rule-breaking with the wine announced last month as winner of the Chenin Blanc Challenge, but the misrepresentation involved is arguably more significant. This example was uncovered by accident when I idly compared the announced technical analysis of the winning wine, Kleine Zalze Vineyard Selection Chenin Blanc 2008, with the analysis given on Kleine Zalze’s website. (Sorry, but it’s the sort of thing wine writers are driven to do, despairing of getting a life.)
The analyses were markedly different. Inquiries that were initially simply curious uncovered some dubious ethics. Briefly, we now know that bottles bearing this label could contain any one of three wines — two fairly close in character and one very different. The labels don’t actually tell lies, but nowhere do they reveal this truth.
The wine that won the competition is emphatically off-dry, with a whack of alcohol. But under the same label, made from grapes that had been picked and turned into wine much earlier in the season, is also a dry, less alcoholic wine. If you have a bottle labelled Kleine Zalze Vineyard Selection Chenin Blanc 2008, you won’t know which version you have.
If, impressed by the fact the wine won the Chenin Challenge, you seek and find a bottle, you’re possibly buying the wrong one. The winner came from a stock that constitutes only about 14% of the wine under that label. The producer chose not to point out this little detail to purchasers, or to Wine, which carried an article quoting interviews with the winemaker and the managing director of Kleine Zalze.
Is this honest? It’s not illegal — surprisingly, perhaps, in a tightly controlled industry. Probably because regulations must accommodate different bottlings under one label of wines made in large quantities (much larger than Kleine Zalze’s — the big brands are made by the millions of litres), it is assumed that the different bottlings will differ marginally, if at all.
There’s little doubt that entering special, unrepresentative selections into competitions is not as rare as one would hope and organisers are increasingly trying to combat the practice to the extent they can. Although the same minority Kleine Zalze bottling of ultra-showy wine was the one offered to various competitions, managing director Kobus Basson denies being motivated by a fraudulent strategy and his tale about how the situation of the different wines came about is plausible.
There’s no apology to the customers treated with such disrespect, but Basson “will consider in future separately identifying wines of the same vintage, marketed under the same brand, which, through the vinification processes followed, may show substantially different characteristics or make-up. This will, however, pose a number of logistical challenges.” We must hope that he, and others, will decide that dealing with logistical challenges is part of the job and a price worth paying for not wilfully misleading customers.
A highly competitive market
But all this may be a diversion from the real scandal of wine competitions — the competitions themselves. One wonders whether, in a highly competitive market where guidance is wanted, the competitions are the “necessary evil” that Christian Eedes of Wine magazine calls them.
First, they make a lot of money, through entrance fees and sponsorships, for their owners. And second, it could be argued that they change the face of wine generally. More and more wines get bigger, bolder and more showy (though not always more drinkable), to stand out — the first duty of wine in a competition where judges normally have time for just a sniff and mouth-swirl of each one.
The judges face a task that is beyond the capacities of most. The bizarreness of many results bears this out: when a pleasant but irredeemably minor co-op chardonnay wins a top trophy at a leading show (where the Hamilton Russell just scrapes a bronze), in a pattern repeated again and again, you must wonder about how seriously to take a dishonest declaration or an unrepresentative sample.
Randomness of results has long been obvious to sceptics. But a concerned American researcher, Robert Hodgson, in two recent papers in the Journal of Wine Economics, put the criticism on a sounder statistical basis. The first showed the unreliability of judges who tasted the same wine three times within one line-up and gave it markedly different ratings each time. Hodgson’s second paper looked at wines entering at least five different competitions in California and compared their results. The distribution of gold medals, he wrote, “mirrors what might be expected should [they] be awarded by chance alone”.
Wine competitions will persist for as long as entrepreneurs and magazines profit from them and producers can use the occasional good result for marketing purposes (ignoring the others). They will continue for as long as wine drinkers find some use in them — even if the awards could be allocated pretty much as usefully by a flip of the coin. No doubt attempting to tamper with the coin before it gets flipped will also continue.