Cincinnati Wine Festival and Wine Competition
The 2008 Cincinnati International Wine Festival is just days away, March 28 & 29. I’m looking forward to the event and recommend you check it out if you’re in the area. Even if you’re not from the area, it may be worth the trip as it’s quite an event.
The festival brings over 600 wines from 130 wineries to the Cincinnati Convention Center. This is one big room filled with booth after booth of wineries, each with a few different bottles for you to sample. You hold up your glass (which you’re given on the way in) and point to the bottle you would like to try, taste away and then move on to try another wine. If they’re not too busy you can chat for a while and get the story behind the wines too.
There are three different tasting sessions lasting 2 – 2 1/2 hours and admission costs $55-65 (depending on which session you want). And for an additional $35 you can attend a special high-end wine tasting prior to the general Grand Tasting. Your admission is partially tax deductible too, as the event raises money for local charities. If you plan to attend, I would suggest arranging transportation or booking a room in a downtown hotel. If you don’t spit and dump you’ll be in no condition to drive afterwards.
When you first arrive it’ll seem crowded and people will be a bit annoying as they are all clamoring to “get their money’s worth.” But step back and you’ll see that the majority of people are following the same route and the first booths when you enter the room are the most congested. Start somewhere in the middle and you’ll be much better off. You’ll also find that after an hour or so everyone starts to loosen up and get a lot more friendly. Hmmmm… I wonder why?
There is also a wine competition that is part of the festival so you can track down the medal winners to see what the judges liked the most. I spoke with Dick Fruewald, who co-chairs the competition with Kevin Neal, to get the low down on the competition. Dick has been involved in coordinating the wine festival judging for some 11 years.
All told, 45 judges tasted 417 wines in over 30 varietals. That’s a record number of wines for this competition. Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon were the most popular varietals entered. Pinot Noir and Spanish wines had a higher number of entries than usual, while entries for Merlot and Shiraz were down.
Fruewald recruits the judges, based on a pool of previous judges and recommendations from within the wine trade. And he puts them through a training to test them out and make sure that all judges approach the competition objectively. The judging is done blind in varietal-specific flights and a 20 point system is used.
The scoring system they use is an adaptation of the American Wine Society Evaluation Chart. The adaption is moving 2 points from “appearance” to “overall impression” so that you end up only giving 1 point based on appearance (it’s correct or not) and have 4 points to work with for overall impression. The judges worked in panels of 5 and multiple panels tasted each wine to ensure scoring consistency.
You may be envious of the judges but while it sounds like fun, it’s a lot of work. The judges spent over 6 hours evaluating 50+ wines each. That make for an exhausting day for the judges. If you want to see what it’s like to judge you can do so at the festival. The program this year includes a chart where you can enter your own evaluation of the wines using the same system that the judges used. You can download the chart here ahead of time: Wine Festival Rating Chart A (3MB), Wine Festival Rating Chart B (8MB).
Which wines did the judges pick as winners? Well, the scores are still being tabulated. You’ll have to attend the festival to find out who the winners are.
