I thought I would get this little rant out of the way at the start of the year. I have moaned about this before (drunkenly and soberly) and hoped that if I write a column on this now, maybe for the rest of the year I can just forget about it. Bear with me, this is going to be a bit of a purge.

Wine competitions.

Born from the union of Satan and Lady Luck, I loathe them. And there a lot of them too. Just in SA there’s the Old Mutual Wine Awards, Michelangelo, Veritas, Top 100 wines, Young Wine Show, Classic Wine Awards, Diner’s Club Winemaker of the year, the various Top 10s, Nedbank Green Wine Awards, Terroir Awards, and more. There are also, of course, the plethora of international competitions. What are these providing other than extra weight to the competition owners’ wallets? Sod all if you ask me.

I have a couple of issues with wine competitions. The first has been made by almost everyone who has moaned about them: that wine tasters palates are fatigued after having tasted over 100 wines. What happens when the 101st wines is a dainty, elegant, reserved little beauty, a wine that asks to be contemplated, a wine that caresses rather than spanks?

Will it be noticed, or will it be passed over and judged insignificant amongst its big showy peers? This, of course, comes down to the skill of the taster and the structure of the competition. I may be overstating it slightly and not giving enough credit to professional tasters, but I think it is a given that certain styles of wine perform better in competitions than others.

This is easy enough to experience. Go out and buy a wine that has been very successful on the competition circuit. You know the ones, they have more gold medals than a mad-hat African dictator, more bling than Fiddy and more sparkle than emo vampires. Go out and taste some of them. I am not saying they will be bad, but their style is broadly similar. Big, bold, in your face wines. Wines that are hard to miss. I find many of them to be obnoxious.

Again, I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with these wines, but to place them in the context of “the best” is patently absurd. Competitions, however, want you to believe that this is the case. A competition presupposes the notion of a winner. Producers want the medals because most wine consumers are like magpies, flocking to bottles with sparkly little medals. “I won,” screams the bottle, “you love me, you really really love me!”

Another problem with wine competitions is that they are not very good at the only thing they are supposed to good at: reliably finding the best wines out of a set. It seems, in fact that they are awful at this. A study published in a 2009 issue of the Journal of Wine Economics analysed “over 4 000 wines entered in 13 U.S. wine competitions” and found that the results were so varied that “the likelihood of receiving a Gold medal can be statistically explained by chance alone.” You can read the full study here.

Chance alone? What the fuck. Why are we paying wine judges when you might as well ask a monkey to roll dice? Not only are competitions promoting a certain style of wine, but there is no certainty those wines are really worthy of gold in the first place. Look, it may be that those 13 competitions employed average tasters, people with not enough experience or training. But come on, chance? Really? Really really?

Chance and competitions should not be bosom buddies. Chance makes one think of roulette, one armed bandits, ching chong fucking cha for goodness sake. Competitions on the other hand are about skill, they are a measurement of those skills against others to prove who’s the best. Why would I challenge you to a race if the outcome was up to chance? Chance, that fickle bitch, has no place in competitions.

Yet wine “competitions” proliferate. Why? Because consumers hate making difficult choices. Consumers like to be told what to do. The mass consuming capitalist sheep like nothing more than to be given an easy way out. Fine dining? No thanks, I’ll smash a Micky D. Explore? Sod that, I want it all on a platter (made of plastic and disposable if you please). Wine, with long shelves filled with hundreds of labels and varieties, is for most  a minefield of imagined faux pas, the worry of undrinkable bottles and fear. Fear of the unknown.

A little gold sticker does wonders for easing this fear. The people who run wine competitions know this, producers know this – which is they fork out to keep entering these charades year in and year out.

OK, I think I have got that out of my system. I’m just tired of people looking at wine in a manner that supposes there can be a winner. Come on. There are wines out there that will make your toes curl in delight, that will make you fist pump, wines that delight; and there are wines so bad that they could only have been foot-trodden by Lucifer, and fermented in the stomach of a dead camel. The best way to explore what’s in between is to:

Look, if you like the kind of wines that win medals then that’s fantastic. Life is easier for you. Follow the gold. Buy the blinged out bottles and be merry. But I warn you, you are missing out, you are letting the man think for you. You are letting him shaft you out of the full spectrum of styles available. Find a wine shop. Ask questions. Be your own wine judge.