Harvest Fair judges begin judging 1,100 wines

Judges on Tuesday started swirling, sniffing and tasting to select the best of the approximately 1,090 wines entered for this year’s Sonoma County Harvest Fair Wine Competition.

Twenty judges decked out in white coats tasted 80 to 95 wines in the Showcase Cafe at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, said Bob Fraser, who coordinates the contest. They will go through about the same number of wines today.

The wines will be judged for a double gold, gold, silver or bronze medal, though a few will get no medals at all.

Any wine with a Sonoma County American Viticultural Area label is eligible.

The best of class winners in all the various categories - such as chardonnays priced from $25 to $35, or cabernet franc - will go to a special tasting on Thursday, where the judges will select sweepstakes winners in the categories of red, white and specialty wines.

The judges are typically paired off in groups of three as they go through a flight of wines, debating the merits through a blind taste test.

In one corner Tuesday, a group was arguing the pluses and minuses of ?43 pinot noir wines priced less than $30 a bottle.

They judged about 10 wines at a time, taking breaks to refresh their palate with bread, olives and sparkling water.

One wine stymied the judges on whether to award a gold or silver medal.

Charles Mara, owner of The Mara Wine Group in Palm Springs, spoke about the richness of the wine and its vanilla spice character.

“It’s that little pinprick at the back of your throat, which makes really good acidity,” Mara said. “That’s the reason why I gave it a gold.”

John Giannini, winemaker at Van Ruiten Family Winery in Lodi, said he was on the fence about whether to give it a silver or gold, so he was leaning toward of a grade of “silver plus.”

Giannini hesitated because he believed the winemaker used too much oak chips in the fermentation process.

“The vanilla is so pronounced in this wine,” Giannini said. “You got spice, you got vanilla, you got oak. It’s like all the things are overpowering the fruit.”

Bob Foster of The California Grapevine newsletter then chimed in that “silver plus is sort of an indication of saying, ‘I could go gold.’?”

Mara noted that the group was going to give so few gold medals in their judging that this wine deserved the gold ranking.

Giannini then relented and the wine received a gold medal.

“That’s my boy. I love you,” Mara told Giannini.

The sweepstakes winners typically see a sales increase in the aftermath of the announcement during the awards dinner, which will be held Sept. 25 at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.

That has been the case for certain wineries like Wilson Artisan Wineries, which typically enters many entries, said Fraser.

In 2010, Wilson’s Pezzi King took two of the three top wines at the Harvest Fair, with its zinfandel winning the sweepstakes for the best red wine and its sauvignon blanc winning the sweepstakes for best specialty wine.

The majority of the entrants are chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon, though pinot noir has experienced a bump in entries in the last decade given its rising popularity.

One up-and-coming category has been rosé, especially driven by an increase in consumers thirsting for the dry rosé category.

The varietal had 23 entries this year compared to about a dozen a few years ago, Fraser said.

“It’s slowly coming back,” Fraser said. “That’s a big trend.”

You can reach Staff Writer Bill Swindell at 707-521-5223 or bill.swindell@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @BillSwindell.