For those of you not familiar with the Portland Indie Wine Festival, back in 2005, Lisa Donahue of LAD Communications and Catherine Healy of Flint Design were brainstorming about how to promote their new, small winemaker clients. They came up with the idea of a juried event for small, independent wineries along the lines of the Sundance Film Festival. This is a fanstastic event!! We have participated since the launch....which happily corresponded to Boedecker Cellars' first release, our 2004 Purity Chardonnay.
Anyway...Each year the wine for PIWF are selected by a jury of wine judges, wine media, and established winemakers from around the US. This year, Athena and I were invited to sit in as "observers" during the judging. This meant that we sat with one of the jury panels and listened to their judging criteria, comments, and debate. It was actually quite enlightening to experience.
The scores are based on a consensus of the jury members, so there were a few quite lively exchanges over a few wines. More surprisingly, though, all four judges rated most wines within one category standard of each other most of the time.While Athena and I didn't taste alongside the judges, we did sneak a few sniffs and sips, and I must say that I would have scored these wines the same as the judges.
Wines were rated Gold, Silver, Silver -, Bronze, Bronze -, Average, or Flawed. No wine in our jury's flight received a Gold -- they really held all these wines from new producers to HIGH standards -- but there were a couple of Silvers and many Bronzes.
Overall, the wines were the range of quality and stylistic correctness you'd expect from new small wineries. Some were great, some were odd, and some were straight up the middle.
The wines receiving marks high enough to enter the competition will provide everyone who comes to the PIWF this year a great experience. Come check it out, and support the growing wine industry in Oregon!
See you there - SB
