My grandparents were impoverished; as was commonplace in Northern England, all had pursued physical labour. Aspirations notwithstanding, my parents were working-class too—culturally and economically, my father had been the first from either family to attend university, albeit as an adult. My upbringing was profoundly industrious. Though both my parents valued education, there was no place for romanticism, myth or fanciful thought. Unsurprisingly, I grew to be a fiercely objective adult, a tenacious learner concerned with understanding the physical world. I had not tasted wine until my mid-20s; neither of my parents had any particular interest. First, I had enjoyed simply tasting wine. Then, I became interested in how wine was grown and made, followed by wanting to understand why some wines tasted so much better than others. Despite a ferocious reading of contemporary wine literature, I felt no more learned. Much of what I read struck me as received wisdom; I found magic, myth and pseudoscience littering popular commentary. As Richard Quandt observes, the wine industry clearly ‘lent itself to bullshit’. It quickly became apparent that accepting myth and mysticism were tantamount to baptism, while challenge constituted blasphemy. Author James Wilson laments doubters of terroir, puzzling at their ‘real appreciation of wine’; meanwhile, Alice Feirring coins challengers as ‘reductionist thinkers’. Producers and journalists alike gleefully propagate shibboleth. Wine need not be magical, though. For many, its allure is wholly practical, and this is sufficient. The rest is superfluous. Perhaps—as the industry contends with a ‘communication crisis’—valorising wines practical appeal might open new doors, inviting pluralist thought and ranging personalities.

Unlike most other agricultural products, bar the most niche of fruit and vegetable, a wine's origin, in some cases down to a single acre of land, is touted as a semi-mystical source of quality. Although lacking an exact definition, Jancis Robinson notes terroir to be a vines 'total natural growing environment'. While some consider farming practices a function of terroir, for the most part, it is inclusive of the place, not the person. It is said that the soil, subsoil, rocks, exposition, mesoclimate, and microclimate of a particular vine, are amongst that which most influence the grapevines phenotype. Although romanticised by the French, recognition of place precedes them by some time. The Ancient Greeks were known to stamp amphorae with a seal of origin, the result being different regions established varying reputations for the quality of their wine. But one need not look to Ancient Greece to observe the importance of place. Anybody who has planted in their own garden will recognise that particular plots, even within a 30m² site, perform better, yielding more fruitful results, than others. However, both viticulture and wine differ greatly from almost all other farming endeavours. The sheer volume of decisions made by the vigneron and the subsequent scale of their influence is so vast that one must wonder to what extent terroir can really be credited for the style of the finished wine. Amongst natural wine circles 'sense of place' has become a hallmark of authenticity. To 'let the place show' is the mantra of the most zen winos. But when these ‘small’ decisions yield such notably broad variance, is this a plausible proposition? Has fetishising terroir obfuscated and subordinated the role of the farmer? A recent conversation with Wine Advocates, Dr William Kelley, stoked my thoughts.

In 1224, in his notable poem Battle of the Wines, Henry d'Andeli tells the story of a famous wine tasting organized by the French king Philip Augustus. In this tasting, samples from across Europe were tasted and judged by an English priest. The priest classified the wines as either 'Celebrated' in the case of those which pleased him or 'Excommunicated' for those that did not. With the rise of the industrial revolution and the growth of international trade, the wine industry has become a $354.7 billion global market. But wine quality cannot be ascertained ex-ante, for this reason, the industry faces an information asymmetry problem. The producer, distributor or retailer involved in the economic transaction often possess greater material knowledge than the general consumer. Where this is the case, systems emerge which attempt to address this information imbalance. Filmmakers spend millions creating trailers, in literature, there are renowned awards such as the Booker Prize, and in the wine industry there have been scores and competitions. From well-established, renowned international awards to small, emerging regional competitions, format and scale is broad and diverse. However, in a marketplace where applications like Vivino provide consumers with immediate community-generated reviews, whether competitions are effective tools in establishing objective, qualitative benchmarks to aid purchasing decisions or serve as revenue-generating marketing machines is not altogether clear. In this article, I explore the research on wine competitions and discuss what producers should consider before entering their wines into a competition.