As we were drifting through a few reflective moments about where the wine world has been, and where it was going, a question arose.  What ever happened to fairs?  You know, pig contests, funnel cakes, and wine judgings.  As we think back to the early days of Wine Exchange (such as it was), we remember what a big deal fair judgings and gold medals used to be in the scheme of wine marketing.  A gold medal at a wine competition like the Orange County Fair, L.A. County Fair, Sonoma Harvest Fair, and the California State Fair were kind of a big deal.  Now, not so much.  What happened?

Well, history happened.  Now mind you we speak from a fair bit of experience having been involved with the local fair for nearly a decade and part of a few judging panels as well.  Over the years we have been on both sides of the do-these-competitions-matter debate, and can play both sides.  But ‘back in the day’, the results of a major competition used to resonate throughout the industry.  Now the effect is pretty short term and localized.  Why?  There are lots of reasons.

Probably the first one is the most obvious.  The advent of the wine journal that has a national or even international following is one of the biggest changes.   Critics existed before that time, but they were largely relegated to daily newspapers.   They were generally not able to market themselves to a broader audience via some other medium.   Thus wine competitions like the O.C. and L.A. Fairs and newspaper sponsored events from the likes of the Dallas Morning News and San Francisco Chronicle had some visibility and juice in the marketplace. 

These days, you don’t have to fumble through a pile of papers to find an ‘awards booklet’.  You can pull your phone out of your packet and look up thousands of reviews from Robert Parker, James Suckling, Antonio Galloni or Wine Spectator in an instant.  If you are a subscriber to these services, or read the offer page on virtually any retailer’s website, you will be exposed to the opinions of these reviewers on all manner of wines.  The writer has become extremely influential in the way that wine is marketed.   Constant exposure is certainly a big part of that.

Perhaps more relevant, is that these writers have a track record.  Whether or not you agree with a particular writer on a given wine, or listen to their recommendations, or think they have their own agenda, you know them.  For better or worse, you know where they are coming from in some sense and can make some of your own judgments on wines based on (or against) what they say.  You have a body of work to look at.

If someone tells you something got a gold medal at a certain fair judging, all you know is that it emerged ahead of the pack in a wine scrum of some sort.  Now we can write volumes about the difficulty of judging in these competitions, sorting through flight after flight of nearly indistinguishable commercial wines.  We probably taste 4000-5000 wines a year among the three buyers, way more than most of the typical judges, and even we get a little tired.  So palate fatigue and the judging format are issues.   But even that isn’t the real problem from a consumer perspective as we see it.

The real issue is identity.  That ‘gold medal’ came from a panel.  A panel of…who?  It could be a bunch of winemakers who rarely taste outside of their own cellars or have definite style biases.  It could be a panel made up of some sort of crony network.  It could be a group of highly competent folks that have radically different style preferences and end up canceling each other out on anything truly groundbreaking.  But the salient point is that you have no idea who they are or what their ‘qualifications’ might be. 

It’s not unlike a Yelp review of a restaurant.  The guy ranting on about how a meal at a certain venue might be one of ‘the best he’s ever had’ doesn’t mean a lot if you don’t know the standard or the experience level.  It could be someone that has collected a couple of hundred Michelin stars over his dining experience or someone for whom IHOP is the benchmark.  Same with medals.  You don’t know the players so what value do you assign to the results?

The internet has changed a lot of things.  A lot of the localized events don’t have the web sophistication and archived data to satisfy today’s impatient, info-hungry consumer.  Why would they?  Plus, a lot of these venues raise revenue by selling award books.  So they aren’t likely to want to give the competition information away for free on the internet should someone be looking for results.  In most cases the people involved with these events are volunteers who enjoy the process.  But they have ‘no skin in the game’ other than maybe a couple of weeks of involvement.  

By their very nature, fairs and competitions had only a limited time impact.   There’s a judging, maybe some showcasing during the fair itself which runs a few weeks, an award book and usually no quick and easy place for interested parties to reference information otherwise.   At a time when there wasn’t much else going on, these competitions received extended and greater play which allowed them to reach beyond their locality and touch a broader audience.  They would get lasting exposure as people could use a gold medal as support for selling or serving this wine or that, which in turn would add back more credibility back to the event itself. 

In today’s world of immediate information, such competitions are at a distinct disadvantage.  They don’t necessarily have the clout to compete with the year round pundits (which didn’t really exist the same way a quarter century ago).  They don’t get near the shelf play (if any) in a sea of 90-point scores from an array of media outlets.  From a strictly evolutionary standpoint, competitions/gold medals would have become more localized and less pertinent even if they had done everything else right.  But in today’s crowded information market, their message simply can’t reach the audience they once did.

It’s summer, and that means ‘fair season’.  They will still exist as a pleasant anachronism to a point because some locals still support it.  But in the bigger wine picture, fairs aren’t much of a factor any more.