What rubbish it is when people spout off about how the best wine is the one in your glass, about how everybody’s taste is different and wine judges’ palates are unreliable, or about how wines can’t be properly assessed without being served with food. Enjoying wine is about more than just the alcohol strength and for sure, life is too short to make do with mediocre or bad wine. We might have smell and taste preferences that vary slightly, but, provided you really enjoy wine in the first instance, whatever finds favour with a group of wine cognoscenti and aficionados is bound to tickle your fancy. And whenever folks talk about ‘food wine’ methinks it ‘needs help to disguise the truth of the matter’.


Of course good wine goes well with good food, but so too it should be able to shine without – whether before or after a meal on its own or in a blind-tasting line-up with the purpose of comparing or scoring wines. Whether the focus is on best value or simply best quality, the competent, experienced judges get it right more often than not and deserving wines are highly rated and awarded on a frequent basis. Well run wine competitions are great at helping us to arrive at a pecking order which, given the number of labels on the market, vintage variations and the prices involved, would otherwise be impossible to arrive at without serious damage to our livers and a lot of money to blow.