Where a gymnast or a skater would expect judges at a regional, European, international or Olympic event to follow a common process, a wine producer submitting their wine to a number of wine competitions may have little idea of the diverse ways in which it will be assessed and possibly rewarded.
Various scoring rules
For example, a wine that has been given a gold medal at one of the 20 or so competitions operating under OIV rules must have received at least 85 points out of 100. A wine with that score would only win a Bronze at the Decanter Wine Awards or the International Wine Challenge in London. For Meininger’s Mundus Vini in Germany, the requirement for Gold is 90. The small number of wines that get 95 points or more receive a Grand Gold, an award also given by OIV events — for wines with a score of 92 or more.
Background information
The information provided to tasters varies too. If one compares a contest that follows the OIV rules with, say, the Decanter Awards, in the former events panels are not told whether they are tasting a German Riesling or a Washington State Chardonnay or vice versa. All they know is that the contents of their glass are white and of a particular vintage and that they fall within one of three levels of sweetness.
At the Decanter event, by contrast, they will be told the country and most likely region where the wine was produced, and the panel chair, who usually has some knowledge and expertise in those factors will generally be expected to provide some background to the wines. In other words, typicity is treated as a predominant factor. There are positive and negative implications to this. A highly ‘typical’ example might delight fans of a particular style while having little appeal to a large number of wine drinkers.
Different evaluation methods
Mundus Vini and the IWC both take a middle ground between these approaches, but they differ in the way their judges assess the wines and allocate awards.
- At the UK event, which drew its inspiration from competitions in Australia and New Zealand, tasters are simply asked to give each sample a score, bearing in mind the medal it would give.
- They then share their verdicts and agree amongst themselves what award – if any – it should get. There is no limit to the proportion of medals that are given, but in practice, it is usually between 35-45%.
- Mundus Vini began as an OIV competition and tasters there still have to complete a rigorous scoring sheet that allocates marks for appearance, nose and palate. They are also required to indicate specific aromas and flavours, allowing the competition organisers to produce the descriptive pictograms for every medal-winning wine that appear on the website. A strict 40% limit is also applied to the number of medals.
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