wine judging
Wine Judging and Position in the Line Up For Tasting & Scoring
Photo from Shintop on Amazon
I recently attended a seminar on a special varietal and the topic of wine judging came up from a well-respected and knowledgeable professor, winemaker and SOMM. A statement was made that a wine in a specific category in the position of first wine being tasted has a 27% chance of being the highest score and winning that flight. I was a bit puzzled by that, so, I began to test that statement.
Background: It should be noted that in all three events for data collection, only three judges out of 31 were the same and wine varietals differ greatly as well as price points.
Having just either conducted or judged at three events, I went back to check not the individual events but the summation of the three events to see if wines in the first tasting of a category actually won with the highest score 27% of the time. While fully admitting three events is not a widespread sampling, it is one that I had all the data available to extract the complete data/information.
Breaking down categories that had a minimum of 10 entries (some had up to 20 entries) the following conclusions were drawn:
**The conclusion of a little over 500 wines being judged that were entered in 3 different competitions showed the following results for the top 10 positions:
#1 in the lineup – 15% had the highest score or tied for the highest score
#2 in the lineup – 5% had the highest score or tied for the highest score
#3 in the lineup – 10% had the highest score or tied for the highest score
#4 in the lineup – 2% had the highest score or tied for the highest score
#5 in the lineup – 17% had the highest score or tied for the highest score
#6 in the lineup – 2% had the highest score or tied for the highest score
#7 in the lineup – 6% had the highest score or tied for the highest score
#8 in the lineup – 5% had the highest score or tied for the highest score
#9 in the lineup – 8% had the highest score or tied for the highest score
#10 in the lineup – 15% had the highest score or tied for the highest score
If a category had up to 20 wines, the cumulative percentage for wines #11 to #20 was 17% with #15 bottle tasted being the highest with 5%. Perhaps palate fatigue was involved? (note: % may not add up to 100% due to rounding of numbers). Most competitions split flights if more than 10. Something to keep in mind when holding competitions and limiting the number in a flight?
When examining events with 10 wine positions only being tasted, the breakout shows a greater likelihood of the positions 1-5 having a better score than positions 6-10:
Positions 1-5 = 23 Best Scores or 57.5%
Positions 6-10 = 17 Best Scores or 42.5%
Statistics are statistics and numbers are numbers, but based on a relatively small sampling it does not show that 27% of the first wine tasted wins the highest scores based on my sampling. It does show that wines #1, #5 & #10 did receive the highest scores. One note is that with 10 wines in a category, any wine in the first 5 wines tasted did score a better chance of being rated higher than the second 5 wines being tasted.
I will continue to monitor the statics at one more event in September and all the events next year.
Sláinte,
Michael Kelly