Monday, January 01, 2007

Jefferson Cup

We've never been particularly good about entering wine competitions. They take quite a bit of time and money. You send in 3 or 4 bottles of each wine you're entering, along with an entry fee for each one, and by the time you add up the postage, cost of the wine, entry fee, and your effort.... well, we've never been sure it was really worth it.

However, wine competitions belong in the category of learning-as-we-go. It's constantly amazing to us how many visitors rely on medals when they decide which wines to try. I saw it over and over while working in the Dexter tasting room.

The funny thing is, most of our wines that don't have medals, don't have them because we've never entered them into competitions. It's not that the medaled wines are better, it's generally that we simply haven't bothered to enter the others into competition. So we're trying to get better about entering.

About 6 or 8 weeks ago we were invited to enter the Jefferson Cup, a wine competition held in Missouri by Master Sommelier, Doug Frost. It's an interesting competition -- it doesn't give out standard medals. Rather they have several designations for selected wines they wish to honor. We recently received the results -- our Dry Traminette and CraneBerry were designated as "Certificate of American Merit" wines and our "Traminette" was designated as an "American Example of Greatness."

So I guess it's time to enter more competitions...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Heather! My boyfriend and I first visited your place in the fall when we were camping. We fell in love with your Merlot. We came back to buy a case a month or so later, only to be sad that you were all out! That was one of the best wines we ever had and look forward to visiting again.Make more Merlot and enter that!
Sarah

Heather said...

Thanks so much, Sarah! We were sad to see it sell out. Holly has more working in the cellar now but it'll be a while before it's ready to sell.
Heather