Wine
competitions and tastings have been
something of an enigma for us over
the past 20 years.
A few years back, we made the decision
to no longer voluntarily enter wine
shows (competitions) or comparative
tastings in magazines that charge
an entry fee and/ or marketing fee.
Our reasoning’s for not entering
shows, competitions and tastings are
many and varied.
Over the last 20 odd years we have
entered and won many medals and accolades
for our wines, which was useful early
on for the company, but as the years
have gone on we believe the usefulness
of these are no longer relevant for
us. The benefit was always short lived
and confined to that wine only. In
fact I believe the winning of these
medals and awards has been detrimental
to the long term development of Sherwood
Estate.
In our situation, basing marketing
activity on winning medals is very
short term and prevents the understanding
of the many unique selling points
of Sherwood Estate. It’s always
an easy option for a sales team to
sell wine on medals/points etc rather
than spending time understanding the
long term attributes of the wine and
wine company, to the benefit of long
term sustained sales.
A few very successful wine companies
do use the medal strategy successfully.
When done, it has to be all out entering
every conceivable competition and
then sustained over a number of years.
One of my main reasons for the negativity
of wine shows, is that I believe they
are ultimately detrimental for the
consumer as well as the producer,
as they don’t encourage consumer
self experimentation of the many and
varied wine styles of the world. Many
of the most interesting wines in the
world are never entered in competitions
and comparative tastings.
What these shows are doing is encouraging
a similarity of style, generally styles
that show up well in shows. So we
are ending up with producers making
wine for shows rather than consumers.
This is leading to the homogenisation
of wine as well as the commodification
of it – this is certainly not
what we as a company are about.
Another of my gripes which most consumers
don’t realise is that all wine
competitions/shows, comparative magazine
tastings are businesses in their own
right with the specific objective
of making money for the organizers,
rather than providing a service to
the consumer as they are sometimes
marketed. Entry fees for the shows
can cost many hundreds of dollars
for a single wine, if medals are won
there are extra compulsory costs of
promotion such as write ups and photos
for medal brochures etc, these costs
run into thousands of dollars for
a single wine.
I used to believe the benchmarking
aspect of entering shows was a positive,
however for the same reasons as above
eg similarity of style, homogenisation
- I now don’t believe this.
We as a company do our own internal
benchmarking using wines from all
over the world with varying styles.
We actively encourage and pay for
our winemakers to attend as many domestic
and international tastings as possible.
Dayne Sherwood
Managing Director
Sherwood Estate Wines
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