2011 Maryland Wine Festival

As any red-blooded, alpha-male jock can tell you, while it’s nice to develop a skill for the sake of self-improvement, if you’re not using that skill to crush the hopes and dreams of another, then it has clearly gone wasted.  Such is the logic behind the amateur wine competition I entered last week at the 28^th annual Maryland Wine Festival. 

This occasion - a two-day event which sports thousands of attendees, hundreds of wines to taste from dozens of wineries, live music, food and craft vendors and a genuine party atmosphere - also acts as the premier opportunity for amateur winemakers from the state to pit their homemade wines against each other mano a mano.  (And that’s including next month’s state fair, which offers the chance to compare your wine to Aunt May’s peach jam in the prestigious “fruit product” category.)

The judging is conducted by members of the American Wine Society using the widely accepted 20-point scale developed by University of California-Davis, which aggregates ratings in the categories of Appearance, Aroma and Bouquet, Taste, Aftertaste and Overall Impression.  Including my 2010 Chardonnay and Malbec, there were 31 wines entered from eight different winemakers.  (Yes eight, in the entire state of Maryland.  See why I need to move to Oregon?)

As the results show here, I was unable to take down Greg Sliviak from Sykesville, who won the competition for the third year running with one of his popular raspberry wine entries, earning an 18.0 score.  Both of my wines earned a score of 14.0, enough to place them in the top third of the competitors.  Considering these were my first attempts at home winemaking, and I know what I would do differently to improve them both, I view it as a pretty good result overall.  However, being the math nerd that I am, a couple simple calculations revealed that when analyzing the overall results by winemaker, my average score would actually put me in a tie for second among the eight competitors, and let’s face it, I would never have dreamed of beating Mr. Sliviak and his golden raspberries from heaven.

All in all, it was a great experience, and needless to say, the two Certificates of Merit I earned have been proudly framed and mounted in the house, garnering a prominent place on the living room wall.