Today was the first official day of the Landmark Australia Tutorial.  A chance for the 12 participants to warm-up and set their bearings for a fairly intensive four days ahead.  I met everyone at the Hyatt at 8:00am and ushered them onto our bus to head towards the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) for a discussion on the subjective nature of wine assessment, followed by a tasting that challenged their ability to consistently assign the same relative scores to a set of wines.

The tasting was set out in two brackets of 10 wines, Riesling then Shiraz, with repeat wines.  The participants were asked to give each wine a score out of 20.  (It’s suprising how much the wine you taste before can influence your assessment of the following wine, hence the point of the tasting.) The wines were then revealed and we discovered that wine 1 was the same as wine 3 and 8 in the Riesling bracket…but were everyones scores for these three wines the same?  Andrew Caillard MW did us proud, consistently giving each wine the same mark out of 20!

The tasting was a glimpse into what the AWRI run for the Australian industry on a regular basis, so our winemakers can hone their skills and become wine show judges, both in Australia and overseas.  We’ve worked with the AWRI over the last year to take the course of shore; Dublin in January and then a second course is due to take place in London on 29 June this year.  (email uk@wineaustralia.com to find out more)

Interestingly over the 12 years that the AWRI has been running the Advanced Wine Assessment Course, the top show judges consistently score their wines within +/- 0.5 of each other when using the 20 point system.