This year’s competition featured 167 different wines produced by both commercial wineries and amateur vintners alike from Kentucky and Illinois.
“One of the best parts of this competition is that it is blind and all wines are judged on standards,” said this year's event coordinator, Tom Curstinger. “The judges don’t know if the wine they are tasting was made by a professional winery or a hobbyist, and sometimes the hobbyists beat the professionals, since they are scored to standard.
32 judges scored the wines on a 100 point scale on criteria such as bouquet, color, clarity, and of course taste. The wines were divided into eight categories, from sweet, fruit, semi-sweet, dessert, and dry.
Flavors included the usual reds and whites, to apple pie, and even butter pecan. And Fruit wines, including pomegranate, elderberry, blackberry, blueberry, peach, pear, strawberry and cherry.
“The way we do the judging, each wine is scored fairly and objectively, and we allow notes from the judges, which helps everyone to improve their wines. In the past there have been some wines that didn’t score well at first but took the notes from the judges and came the back next year and medalled. And at the end of the day we want to help everyone make better wine.
Curtsinger said one of the goals the group has for the contest is to reach out to the amateurs and help them to grow, and produce good wines.
“There are a lot more amateur winemakers out there and that’s who we really want to reach out to and help, even if they want to just do it for fun and a hobby. It’s a cool feeling to know you put together a wine that ranked better than some of the commercial wines out there. It makes that wine taste even better to do that.”
The winners will be announced and medals will be presented in a couple of weeks. West Kentucky Star will have complete results.
If you want to learn more about making wine, or how to start making wine, or how to enter next year's contest you can contact the West Kentucky Winegrowers Association on Facebook.
