Grapes of Desire

+ Wine

Grapes of Desire Wine judging is not for the faint-hearted nor the adjectively-challenged, Nicola Edmonds discovers.

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nicola edmonds is a north & south contributing writer. photography by nicola edmOnds

f you thought that judging wine is a cushy lark, you’d be wrong.

It’s 8.30am. For the 13 judges in this year’s New World Wine Awards, 40 glasses of sauvignon blanc are awaiting their verdict on each table. A solid wall of pungent, passionfruity perfume hangs in the air and bright shafts of sunlight slant in through the wrap-around windows of the Westpac Stadium, prisming through the crystalline blonde of the wines.

Sniff, slurp. Spit and clink – the only audible sounds, besides the occasional scratching of pen on paper. There’s an exam-hall hush. Watching them in action, you sense that judges are a breed apart.

Wine judging is quite Darwinian, says Simon Nunns. “If you’re not fit, you don’t survive – plain and simple.”

He doesn’t just mean a strong elbow.

The night before competitions he’s careful not to overdo it with the free hospitality. “I usually get up, go for a bike ride beforehand. So I was out of bed at 5.30 this morning – went to the gym.”

A good palate is vital, but equally, so is being a team player – “It’s not about who can bray the loudest” – and a judge must have a method to their musings when working from show to show.

Nunns is a winemaker at Coopers Creek vineyard and one of the judging

team for this year’s New World awards.

Every judge has their own technique; Nunns follows a few basic steps. On first run through, he looks at and smells each wine quickly; pushing away or pulling forward, based on first impression, so that the glasses on the table are physically arrayed as runners in a race.

There’s a second pass to assess colour, aroma, taste and again he moves the glasses to reflect their rankings in his esteem. Another quick sorting is done to sift the keepers from those to be dismissed. “You have to be sure you’re using the right reasons for the keepers.

First look for the absence of faults.”

I ask what one might expect to waft from a not-so-good wine.

“Plastic, plasticiney, bandaidey characters,” he says, off the top of his head. “Sweaty saddle – and that’s not positive!” he adds, as though I think it might be.

The x-factor for these awards is that the wines are affordable and available. All must be priced $25 or less at retail and vineyards must be able to supply at least 500 cases. This year, 164 wineries have entered with 28 of those new to the competition.

Wines are numerically coded and tasted blind. The awards follow a standard 20-point scale: gold (18.5-20), silver (17-18.4) and bronze (15.5-16.9).

A bronze will be very good, but a wine that merits a gold has the magic edge.

Judging panels consist of three judges (selected from a pool of professional winemakers and experts in the wine industry) and two “associates” who are chosen from New World staff. Scores are tallied across all the criteria for each varietal and recalls requested for those deemed to be close to a gold score. Judges then read out and compile their notes for any that merit awards.

The invited judges are opinionated and confident and their conversations robust, but there are no real dramas.

The associate judges are here to learn, and although their scores aren’t included in the final tally, they’re encouraged to contest the pros. The atmosphere is collegial and there’s less bombast than you might expect. Here, the tributes are sparsely composed and delivered in haiku stanzas.

This is the poetry of vitis vinifera, the drama. From “bright, juicy and youthful” Right: xxx.

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Left: xxx

to “tight, bosomy and ripe”. Salty, grimy, grubby. Clean, punchy. Crunchy. All delivered in staccato tones reminiscent of those of a race caller eying the line-up.

Across the room, a female voice refers to a wine as, “dull – a little shy on the nose.”

A gold is discussed among one panel variously as “reductive, raw” and with “grimy aromatics”. The floating adjectives are punctuated by the particularly clear ting of good glasses jostling one another.

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eyond the judging room, just down the hall, long snaking lines of trestle tables disappear off into the horizon, groaning under the weight of the assorted wines to be tasted by the judges. While the judges are busy peering contemplatively into the middle distance next door, the stewards are scurrying about preparing for the next varietal.

With so much at stake, the glasses sent out for judging are checked, 4 | N O R T H & S O U T H | N OV E M B E R 2 0 1 2

checked and triple checked. All the same, there is still always a potential for mix-ups, and the stewards all know they’re to call a halt to the proceedings if there’s even a whiff of a mistake.

The team has been selected from New World stores and Foodstuffs liquor buyers. I ask if there’s any sneaky tasting going on offstage, given the rivers of wine that are being thrown down the sink throughout the day. Is anyone tempted? The steward responds coyly: “It’s allowed but not encouraged.”

Next door is a small fluorolit space which houses the most important member of the pit crew – a commercial glass cleaner that runs on two-minute cycles throughout the day; 1500 glasses will pass through this behemoth, three times over.

An industrial-sized coffee machine is equally important to the proceedings, and in action constantly in a makeshift café down the hall, providing caffeinated relief beside a

trestle table stacked and refreshed with plenty of stamina-enhancing, palatecleansing goodies. House-made?? sausage rolls and custard tarts are deemed to be particularly effective.

Brian Casserly is a steward this year.

He’s been with Foodstuffs for 18 years, starting off as a wine junior. There was no beer in the stores back then. Most customers bought cask wine and even that in very small quantities. The punters were doubtful of the concept of buying wine in a supermarket. “I can remember them asking me if it was the same thing,” he says, as though something else, something inferior were being passed off in the bottles with their familiar labels.

Over the years, Casserly has seen a change, with the emergence of a demand for quality. “I wouldn’t say demand is for very high-end stuff, but certainly a shift away from cask.” There’s no irony in his tone. “A hell of a shift.”

These days, the supermarket has become the number one stop for wine buyers. Customers aren’t necessarily price-driven but very easily led and seduced by promotions. Casserly tells me that within each price bracket, a customer tends to have their own “repertoire” of five to six wines from which they’ll choose the best buy. Although he believes New Zealanders are generally not snobbish in their preferences, they are confused. We know what we like but not necessarily why or how it differs.

“We don’t seem to be able to sell the amount of trouble gone to, to select these wines.” So the next big step is to work on educating the consumers.

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good judge has what is known as “palate memory”, I’m told. Many judges can apparently remember every wine they’ve ever tried – the sensory equivalent to total photographic recall. This is an innate ability, and no amount of bibulous legwork can teach it. But experience is important. Just like Nunns, Terry Copeland turns to a physical fitness metaphor, comparing judges (himself included) to marathon runners. Legs and body build up a muscle memory – eventually, at the marathon itself, they know what to do.

Copeland is one of New Zealand’s leading international judges, with over 20 years’ experience in the wine

industry. Today, he walks me through a tasting of three different varietals, painting a picture for me of the characteristics and vagaries of each.

Over the first pair of sauvignon blanc I should look for tropical fruit, herbaceousness and citrus. I get “straw and fruit”. Moving on to the chardonnays, Copeland discusses barrel smells which range from “pencil sharpener to rich cigar box”. Me? Well, I do get a whiff of “heated wood” and an oaky tang on my tongue. Perhaps I’m just suggestible. The question is what might I glean without an expert at my side?

Besides, most of my focus is centred on my slurp and spit technique. I have seen some quite remarkable control and aim exercised by the judges present today. These are modern-day Tom Sawyers, capable of spurting a thin stream neatly and precisely into the plastic-lined buckets beside them.

Copeland assures me that it’s perfectly fine for me to swallow, “though we never do” he avows primly. I won’t be uncouth; I think my gurgle is admirably restrained but my spit is short and very wet. I’m reminded of the dentist’s chair.

Copeland explains that it is vital for judges to pay attention to their first impressions of a wine’s aroma. The brain is capable of actively ignoring a particular smell if it becomes overwhelming, in order to pick up other scents around it. “If you smell the same thing repeatedly, you’ll lose it.”

As the day wears, on there’s a shift

in pace. The sun slips down past the rim of the Cake Tin and the judges roll up their sleeves and wade into the big reds. The bright perfumes of the morning are replaced by the sensual, sinuous scents of syrah and shiraz.

As chairman of the judging panels and unofficial mother hen, Jim Harré’s job is to select and blend the judges into appropriate teams. More importantly, he is also responsible for collecting and collating their tasting notes to present in the awards booklet that New World produces. The inclusion of comments taken directly from the judges is unique among wine shows in New Zealand.

Every judge has their own terminology, favourite words, a particular shorthand for the notes that they write (often unintelligible to all but themselves).

Each develops their own nomenclature.

The same conclusions in judging panels tend to be presented with quite different descriptions.

Should anyone find themselves at a loss for words, there is a chart of aromas which can be found much in evidence on the associates’ tables. Chin in hand, associate Vanessa McCutcheon is regarding the final line-up of bloodred vessels stoically. “Umm… I’m finding it quite hard,” she confesses.

McCutcheon was put forward by her store manager as a potential associate and reached the top eight selected from 30 others from around the country, after just one day of training. Sheepishly, she admits that she has only become a wine drinker during the last 18 months, since she’s been working in the Wanaka store’s liquor section.

And before that?

‘Rum!’’ Meanwhile, the more seasoned judges still seem fresh. These professionals are fêted as sensory thoroughbreds and will be enjoying a plush hotel, nice dinners and “interesting” wines at their disposal in the evenings.

I watch a group of them leaving at the end of the first day, striding nice straight lines out across the concourse – spring lamb-like in their steps. No sign of the 549 wines that they’ve sniffed and swilled during the last eight hours in the oenological service of their nation so that we, the confused, not to say ignorant, wine lovers can now happily short-circuit our supermarket aisle meditations and go straight for gold! +