American Wine Society - Wine Judge Certification

I joined the American Wine Society two weeks ago. Part of a new Napa Valley Chapter.
The AWS mostly is a social and educational group. Monthly meetings and wine tastings. However they also have a Wine Judge Certification Program (WJCP). I joined this the other day.

The WJCP is a 3 year program that revolves around learning the principals of tasting, learning your own capabilities, limitations, learning how to judge, and how to conduct a judged tasting. There is an exam of the judge candidates that is held each year at their national convention. You have to pass the exam for each year to proceed to the next years syllabus. I don't have all of the details yet, but it seems that there is a written test with multiple guess, true/false and also essay questions. There is also a tasting during which you describe and score 5 wines and also in a separate tasting you need to recognize among 7-8 possible wine faults out of 9 wines and a base control wine. The base wine is duplicated among the test samples and they may duplicate a certain fault as well. You need to recognize 7 of the 10 to pass.

One the 5 wine tasting, the way I understand it is that there are 3 judges who will also taste the wines and develop a consensus description and consensus score. The candidate needs to come within a certain number of points in the scoring when compared to the consensus in order to pass the test.

As part of working on this there is an online tasting group that meets monthly to learn to calibrate and standardize their descriptions, in the hope that they will then learn to calibrate against the judges.

Being a Californian and being near Napa Valley, I am used to a certain subset of wines - the "international" varieties that everybody knows: e.g. Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay,. Riesling, Syrah, Zinfandel, Petit Syrah, Sauvignon blanc, etc. The tasting group tonight was tasting A Concord desert wine and a Pink Catawba desert wine. Next month it will be Norton, Chambourcin, and Vignoles. Now I have heard of these before and have actually been impressed by a Norton that I had, but I am not so sure that I even know what color the other two wines are. This is a good reminder that there are a lot of wines that are grown on the east coast , in the northern states and mid-west that are popular, but tend to be local to the area where they are grown.

A good example of this is my brother who lives on the east coast and who loves scuppernog but has never heard of Zinfandel or Sauvignon blanc, both wines that I love and I of course have never tasted a scuppernog. It is like we have two different wine drinking countries. I think also that some west coasters are prejudiced against the American or Hybrid varieties but mostly because they don't know them.

Anyhow I am looking forward to following along with this judging program and will keep this blow updated with those events.

john