Gold medals and Australian wines

James Silverton wrote

Hi James This is, I think, a can of worms you may have just prised the lid off. I personally pay little attention to medals, trophies etc. To me these are simply more for their marketing verbiage than anything. The single most prestigious trophy awarded in Oz is the Jimmy Watson Trophy (JWT) awarded at the Melbourne Wine Show for the best 1 year old red wine. This is of course odd in itself, the best 1 year old red is then hailed by the general (not wine) press as the best red wine in the country. These wines are nearly always a totally different creature by release. A great marketing opportunity sure but who would give a trophy for a building that is half finished? Yet the Oz wine industry continues to do it year after year. Some winerys also make their wines in an attempt to win this trophy and only the big boys generally can afford to play those games. Last years winner was Cbuttella Premium Cab Sav 03. These are the people who bring you Yellow Tail and reap enormous profits for their efforts. The have very little "street cred" amongst the Oz wine community and so I guess they thought they would purchase some by buying up some good fruit (not riverland stuff for sure) and custom designing a wine to win the JWT. (Though I have been told but some tasters I respect that their premium range is pretty darn good).

To try and actually address your question though, The Capital City Shows (Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Hobart, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra) top the list, followed by the wine region shows. Trophies are best followed by gold, silver and bronze medals, the clbutt simply refers to wine style. You can find some info about the clbuttes and major awards from the upcoming Melbourne wine show here

You will see that there are clbuttes for commercial wines (more than 2500 cases production) so wines are benchmarked in their clbutt and compete for points based on that premise (which is of course known to the judges) This is how some of the relatively inexpensive wines have gold medals (in their clbutt, is the unstated sub text). This will be clean and well made wines (though usually a bit dilute in flavour) fine for everyday drinking but still a $10 wine. Hope that helps shed some light for you.

Cheers Andrew