We showed our wines from 1998 to 2002. Over this period our Chardonnay was awarded many trophies and Gold Medals. The Pinot Noir achieved top of class as well as many Gold medals. Both wines received Bronze and Silver medals too.

It sounds like a consistent performance BUT, much to our concern, the same wine could achieve the top wine in one wine show and a score that meant it was a faulty wine in another show a week later. Click here for a journalists thoughts on wine shows. One thing we did observe, indeed learn, was that on the wine show circuit, wines must be bright. In the case of Pinot Noir and Gamay this usually means that the wines have been fined and filtered. Part of our decision to stop entering wine shows relates to our desire to minimally handle our reds, i.e. bottle them WITHOUT filtration.

Another concern, was our suspicion that low levels of cork taint that occur in 5 to 10% of wine could cause the same batch of wine to have an inconsistent performance in wine shows. The problem is magnified when a wine, not showing at its best can be next to a very fine wine that has no hint of cork taint, furthermore, the judge only has an average of 45 seconds to eliminate the non medal wines from the mass of entries.

If a wine reviewer from a newspaper is on the tasting panel at a wine show, they may form a bad opinion of our wine if it has this low level cork taint and resultant low score. Of course it can work in reverse as happened when Huon Hooke was on the panel that gave our 2000 Chardonnay the best white wine at the Southern Victorian Wine Show. He gave wonderful reviews.

In our early days on the show circuit we discovered that wine reviewers may also have the same problem as they face a huge line up at each tasting and low levels of cork taint may slip through. Luckily for us, we were tipped off by one respected Sydney based writer that a wine of great acclaim had performed badly in his tasting.

A second bottle looked much better when shared with him.

Thus we decided to withdraw from the show circuit. We are now moving our wines to metal screw caps to minimize the variation that has been noticed between bottles. Maybe we should go back to the wine show circuit? Not yet. We will give our current policy of showing the wines to reviewers a little time to settle in.