This is an implicit question in all of our heads, especially for beginners, who would like to impress their guests with a good bottle, without paying too high of a price. How to get there?
Well, there are quite a few obvious tell-tales which will help educate your eye for good picking, before even educating your palate.
1) Only buy bottles with a cork, not a screw cap. Corks make oxygenation, which will in turn help the wine live longer. It may also add a woody/timbered/leafy aroma, with perhaps a hint of vanilla, which can help the complexity of the wine.
However, if you wish to drink the wine young, you may want to buy a bottle with a screw cap. The screw cap keeps the bottle sealed and does not allow oxygen to enter the bottle. This ensures that the wine remains crisp and well-preserved.
On the other hand, cork should be used for more complex wines such as chardonnay and reds, including zinfandel, merlot, cabernet sauvignon and syrah.
That's why young Australian and Chilean wines can be bought in screw opening, but they will be quite young, so will be some basic table wine, not something special.
2) Look at the sticker/tag on the bottle: what is written?
If there is only an indication of the type of grape, then it’s bad. Wine needs to be qualified: where does it come from? On what soil did it grow? As we said before, most wines are not made 100% of 1 wine variety but are assemblies... so if the wine label just says "Cabernet Sauvignon", how to understand what tanins you are going to get? Is it 40% or 85% Cabernet Sauvignon?
If there is the grape and region, it's still bad.
If there is the grape, the region, and sub-region, it’s a bit better but still bad. You really want to look for those who are proud of their production, so they will have a chaeau/domain name, or at least the village name.
3) Look at the vintage, as mentioned previously. Great years are 2005, 2009, and 2010 for both regions.
4) Watch out for the tricky wine medals! Many winemakers want to "upgrade" their wine by mentioning it won such and such Gold Medal prize from a competition.
Wine Competitions are a hit. Thousands of wines each year get medals. For fifteen years, the number of competitions has been constantly increasing, and so has the number of samples. France is leading the organizing countries, with a whopping 104 events allowed per year ...
If some get scammed by the value of these distinctions, the amateurs have a mocking laugh. Rightly! These medals have a significant impact on sales .... Among the hundreds of bottles lined up in hypermarkets, a medal is still attracting the eye of the neophyte. It offers a certain value, a scale, when choosing. "If a wine won a medal, it should be good!
NO GREAT WINES PRESENTED AT THESE COMPETITIONS
So do not expect to always find the best wines among the medalists. With few exceptions, major labels and wines from prestigious appellations are absent from the contest. That makes sense: they have something to lose and nothing to gain. Yet serious areas regularly present their production and are often rewarded. The medals, especially those obtained year on year, reassure customers, suggest a "good" wine. In fact, a medal guarantees producers a market and allows it to negotiate its prices upwards. It is therefore sought. But is it really for the amateur a guarantee that the wine is good?
First observation, a medal is not an official quality, unlike some competitions brag about. Winemakers present their wines a first time. Then, if the wine is award-winning, winemakers may display a degree in their vault and reference it in their advertisements. They then repay to buy the famous macaroons affix stickers on their bottles. The more of medal-winning wines, the more the organizer makes a living ...
Then, there is the method of wine tasting. In most competitions presented here, the wines are tasted once, usually in one morning, by a panel of three to seven people. The medals are awarded to wines that taste the best that day, according to the tasting conditions and above all other wines in competition. This has no universal value. Most organizers also tighten the amplitude of juror notes and some smooth results. In the end, the contest distinguishes wines which are rather average, which match the market, which are to drink quickly.
FINDING THE PROPER JURY
One of the contests' Achilles heel regarding jurors: Are all of them professional tasters? Would their grades be the same if they tried wines elsewhere? The more jurors, the more difficult it is to unite not only quality tasters. This is the challenge competitions that judge many wines: you have to find 2400 jury members for the Concours Général Agricole in Paris. Most of them are just volunteers!
Given the increasing number of contests and the importance given to awards in France and abroad, the Fraud Control Squad conducted the survey in 2007 on "the veracity of medals attached to the bottles." The organization pointed out the difficulty to trace wine medalists. This year, over 464 inspections in the cellars, only one report has been prepared for proven fraud. This is reassuring, but reminders for "anomalies" were sent to 9% of companies. And 20% of the analyzed wines (one out of five!) Were not consistent with those presented to the contest.
So be careful when counting on medals to make your wine choice!
The two nationally and internationally recognized competitions are the Concours de Macon and the Concours de Paris.
