They aren’t as many studies are showing.  My long-held opinion from decades of personal experience is that ratings, reviews, and judgings are too subjective to be useful.  In other words, it is all B.S. that the public believes has some value.

I’m going to hit a few points from this Wines & Vines Magazine blog and recommend that you read Peter Mitham’s article in that link.

“A survey of approximately 65 judging panels between 2005 and 2008 yielded just 30 panels that achieved anything close to similar results, with the data pointing to “judge inconsistency, lack of concordance–or both” as reasons for the variation. The phenomenon was so pronounced, in fact, that one panel of judges rejected two samples of identical wine, only to award the same wine a double gold in a third tasting.”

Other examples are cited.

Winery revenue can be greatly impacted by this crap-shoot process.   For wineries that get lucky at this game their revenue increases but what of the wineries that are unlucky?  Wine costs have to pay for all these competitions as thousands of wines roll the dice to get at least a medal once in a while.

Since almost all wine now is at least good and usually very good to great the public is getting little due diligence value and having to pay the costs of this game in the price of the wine.

I’m looking at other methods that are being proposed that will have more value for tasters and wineries.  The main feature request that vintners have for WineQuesters.com is a ratings and review system. It is available and ready for them to accept consumer ratings and reviews.

- jim