Learning from Judged Wine Competitions

Wine competitions are a great way to get non-biased feedback and improve the overall quality of your wines. Andy has been entering wines in competitions since 2016 and has earned 142 medals to date! Feedback from judges is not always easy to take, especially when someone clearly doesn’t like a wine, but reading notes and descriptions from judges’ tasting experiences can help a winemaker identify flaws that they might have missed or make an already good wine even better.

Our 2021 vintage did extremely well in both the Colorado State Fair Hobby Wine Competition as well as the Colorado Association for Viticulture and Enology’s (CAVE) Amateur Winemaker Competition . We submitted 32 wines to the Colorado State Fair and took home 30 medals overall including a Best in Class award for Rochoso Blackberry. At the CAVE competition, we submitted 31 wines (we forgot to ship one!) and took home 30 medals including golds for both Vin Blueberry and Vin Cranberry.