One of my favorite pre-Fair traditions is being a judge for
the Clark County Fair Home Winemaking Competition. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?
In reality, all you really need to be a wine judge is a willingness
to drink amateurly fermented fruit juices (and the occasional vegetable or
flower) and provide honest and hopefully helpful feedback.
Often there are some very impressively tasty entries…stuff
that gets consumed quickly when the competition is over and the judges start
sharing tips on which bottles are worth sampling (not all judges judge all
wines in the Fair’s competition).
Most years, though, Rob and I eagerly anticipate sampling
some really weird, stinky, spit-worthy wine.
Stuff that makes your nose hairs curl and your taste buds scream for
mercy. Why? Why torture ourselves like that? Because you can learn a lot from other people’s
mistakes. (Rob has been a hobby
winemaker for nearly 20 years.)
So this year, with no Fair and no homemade wine to judge
other than our own, we were determined to concoct a surrogate.
The first thought was to purchase the cheapest bottles of
wine we could find at local wineries. There
are a few good wineries around our county, and a lot of mediocre ones. Surely an array of $8 bottles of wine from some of the
less-accomplished local vintners would be a good stand-in for the Fair Judging experience we have come to love.
To my astonishment, my online tour of our county’s wineries
revealed everyone has seriously upped their vino game since the last time we
drove around sampling. No goofy fruit
blends, no heavily sugared “effervescent” wines, no ill-advised attempts to
grow hot weather grapes in the drippy Pacific Northwest. Instead, I couldn’t find any bottles under
$25. And all were earnest, adulty
varietals.
Plan B!
A couple of weeks ago, I procured a collection of wines from
stores not typically known for their elegant wine offerings. With a budget of $6 per bottle, I grabbed containers
from Walgreens, 7-Eleven, a local mom-n-pop convenience store, and Chevron. "Containers”
because two competitors came in little boxes with plastic caps. I had six samples in total, plus Rob’s very
recently bottled homemade Riesling from grapes in Woodhaven's front yard.
To hopefully mitigate bias and pre-conceived notions, I put each
wine in a brown paper bag secured with a rubber band to hide the labels. Klassy!
Unfortunately, this also hid the type of wine which made some of the
judging tricky. Because for some of the
wines, it was horribly challenging to decipher what the winemaker was aiming
for. (“THAT is a Chardonnay?!?”)
Using an eraser and white-out, I fashioned “WOODHAVEN FAIR
AT HOME” score sheets from ones Rob still had from his disappointing Fair entry
in 2008. We were as official as we could
be.
Rob presented one bottle at a time from our wine
fridge. He assigned each a tag number,
at first sequentially and then nonsensically (1, 2, 3, 4, 172, 5, 30642). We each had water to cleanse our palates and
rinse glasses between samples. As dump
buckets, I dipped into my collection of souvenir Clark County Fair Dairy Women’s
milkshake cups. With score sheets, pens,
and Hawaiian music swaying in the background, we were ready to dig in!
As we do with official judging, Rob and I silently and
independently judged each wine. We
swirled, we sniffed, we tasted, we held the glass against white paper to
evaluate color, we scribbled notes, we tried to keep poker faces. We were very
serious about judging less-than-$6 wines in brown paper bags.
We tallied our scores and then discussed our findings. Per Official Judging guidelines, if our
scores were more than 3 points apart, we explained and reconsidered and
adjusted. Last night, this only happened
once.
Among the comments on our tally sheets:
“Heavy, boring.”
“Absolutely forgettable.”
“Overripe. Slightly Cheeto”
“Grape Fanta! With a
hint of yeast.”
“Overly oaked to cover up bad fruit.”
“Complicated – the elements aren’t consistent; looks heavy
and smells ripe but tastes light and citric with a nutty finish.”
“Oak, plus a little rotten egg”
“Easy to sip and forget”
“Grapey but then becomes metallic and then woody. Almost like chewing on the stick of a grape popsicle.”
“Might as well be wood-flavored water.”
“Not enjoying anything about this.”
“Not pleasant. Moldy. Nutty. Herby. Whatever this is, I’d send it back for being
corked.”
“Smoked meat and dried plum”
“Almost tomato-y”
At the end, I jokingly suggested we also judge our dump buckets. You know, the plastic milkshake cups
filled with a disproportionate blend of the leftovers of each wine we sampled?
The Dump Bucket came in 3rd place.
Did we find any true winners? Anything we would actually buy again to enjoy
not ironically?
Yes!
Ladies and gentleman, our winner with 14.75 points out of a
possible 20:
The rest of the tally sheet shaped up like this:
2nd Place – Rob’s 2018 Woodhaven Riesling (score
13)
3rd Place – The Dump Bucket (score 12.5)
4th Place – Tie between both boxes…Vendange Cabernet
Sauvignon
4th Place – Liberty Creek Merlot (score 12)
6th Place – Gallo Sweet Wine (score 9.75)
7th Place – Tisdale Pinot Noir (score 8.25)
8th Place – Yosemite Road Chardonnay (score 7)
I gotta admit, although I still prefer sampling weird country-inspired
wines like Peach Bell Pepper and Late Harvest Kiwi, last night’s Fair At Home
competition was pretty entertaining. And enlightening. We tried stuff
we would have never considered trying based solely on price, and we found a
winner we arrogantly assumed was too unsophisticated for our Napa-informed
palates. Cheers to cheap surprises!
Next year for the Real competition for the Fair, I’m totally bringing my own dump bucket and judging it at the end just for giggles.
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| We might have a small collection of wine-themed tshirts. And that mess-o-hair is gone! I'll do a Hair Blog post-Fair. |
1 comment:
Fun times! We regularly buy from the bottom shelf - I recommend Winco and Grocery Outlet. Southern hemisphere labels tend to dominate, as it turns out. Next time you're over we should compare notes :-)
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