Wine judging is a strange endeavor. As weird, I imagine, as the judging at country fairs of jams, tarts, cakes, flower arrangements, and whatever other product of pastoral hobbies are put forward.

The strangeness I believe comes from the stark difference between those judging and those consuming. The judges are professionals, obsessives, and enthusiasts, known to be slightly bonkers when it comes to the product in question. We must sip swirl and spit our way to recommending wines to joe-public, who couldn’t really give a toss whether his Shiraz has a bit of Brettanomyces (a naughty yeast that makes a wine smell like stinky animal sheds) or if his cabernet has too much dead fruit. That’s not fair I guess, but as a generalisation I’ll keep it.

Each time I sit on a wine-judging panel I feel the need write a column about it. I do this, I imagine, to create a sort of connection between the insular absurdity of the five people locked in a room tasting 70 wines a day for three days, and the outside world.

It’s weird, it takes a lot of concentration, and you are always on the e no idea what you are doing.

Rather than rehash the pitfalls of tasting panels I thought I would give you the description of how it works, and you can see the pitfalls and positives for yourselves. Arguments in the comments welcome.

The tasting panel I have just sat on is for a magazine. We tasted around two hundred red blends over three days. Using the 20-point system – a wine that is faulty scores 12; a wine that is perfect scores 20 – we rated the wines. These scores are converted into star ratings used by the magazine: one to five stars in half star increments. All quite simple.

Each morning we took our seats at yellow-pine desks, the 70 wines for that morning’s tasting spread out before us. The wines are tasted in small numbered tasting glasses. The tasting is blind, and all we knew about the wine was its number, and its style. We only tasted red blends, but this was broken down into Shiraz based blends, Cabernet based blends etc.

Then, simply, we tasted. The colour is examined, checked for ageing, intensity, and to make sure there are no faults – cloudy, murky, etc. The wine is swirled and a sniff taken. Initial notes are written down. For example:

Deep purple red. Defined rim. 2009/2010. Pine needles upfront, some cassis notes. Clean. Leading with Cab most probably.

Another swirl and sip. The wine is swished around, air is sucked through it, a few more swirls and is spat out into a spittoon. Mouth smacking noises are made, all the while the brain is ticking over charting the physical experiences of the mouth from the moment the wine enters, to the time it joins its cousins in the spittoon. Freshness, intensity of flavour, fruit character, oaking (if any), length, structure, sweetness/dryness, is it delicious, could you have another glass, and a number of other characteristics that make up a wine are run through. The tasting note is completed, a score given:

Good intensity. Clean mouthfeel, with vibrant freshness. Oaking is judicious, with fruit still allowed to lead. Already good integration. Dark red fruits and casiss. Pencil lead. Long finish. Well structured. 17/20

This process is then repeated. 70 times.

Once all the wines have been tasted, and the scores entered into a commuter by an auditor – this must all be above board, dear chap – the chairperson of the panel calls out the number of each wine and we, in turn, call out our scores, and an average is given.

Here is where discussion and argument take place. If I have tasted a wine and think it brilliant enough to be awarded 18 points – classic, a masterpiece – but a colleague has deemed it only worthy of 15 – good to fine – I will fight for why I think it is brilliant and she will point out the flaws.

It is quite common for someone to have made a mistake and on retasting will see the positives pointed out by another judge (or the flaws) and can change his or her score.

When everyone is happy with their scores we move on.

And that’s that. Panel tasting. Competition tasting.

I would prefer to leave the pros and cons of this sort of tasting to the comments section. However, I will point out one fault, which for me is the biggest. We only have a very short time to taste each wine; around a minute at the most. This means that if someone buys a bottle of our highest scoring wine they will take longer to drink their first glass than we did on scoring the whole bottle. The beauty of wine is its complexity – and while the system is pretty good at rooting out simple, and overtly awful wines – I think the system fails at recognizing and awarding the subtle changes and nuances in a wine. Obviously we cannot judge like this.

Are there other issues you have with this sort of system? Please join in the conversation below.