Wine Enthusiast Magazine
SubscribeI’ve been mulling over the status of Two-Buck Chuck as the best Chardonnay in California for about two weeks now and I still can’t accept it. The news leaked on about June 27 that judges at the California State Fair Wine Competition gave Charles Shaw Chardonnay California a double-gold medal, but the official results of the judging won’t be released until Thursday, July 12.
How could a simple, cheap wine come out of a respected wine competition with a double gold medal? I was going to let the question go and get on with my life when I did a blind tasting of four Chardonnays last Friday. It was strictly blind.
My favorite, with 89 points, was round and buttery, a bit of toasty oak in the aroma, good length — substantial. This turned out to be a $9 McWilliams Chardonnay Hanwood from Southeastern Australia. What a great value. Five other staff members out of 11 also ranked it first.
My second-place wine, the only one of the four that seemed to get better over half an hour’s time, and which I rated 88, was MacRostie Carneros 2005 ($22). It had a fresh, lees-aged kind of vitality, clean light fruit flavors and a lingering finish. Not this crowd’s favorite, though.
My third-place wine was a simple, good white wine, rated 81. This was Hacienda Chardonnay California 2005 ($7).
The fourth wine, and the least tasty to me at 78 points, was Charles Shaw California 2005 ($2). It smelled slightly waxy, had very little flavor and a dull impression on the palate. Rating 78.
The Hacienda and the Charles Shaw, however, tied for second in terms of how many people chose them as their best of the four. The staff’s wine experience runs from one normally non-drinker to two of us who have judged professionally, but most are in their late 20s to early 30s and are interested amateurs.
Judges in the California State Fair are writers, winemakers, merchants — all presumably wine pros of some sort — and have to pass a test to prove they can identify several wine faults, etc., before they become judges (at least that was required when I judged there years ago.)
The point is not that I’m right and the state fair judges were wrong when they selected Two-Buck, but it makes me ask, how could this happen? A clearly simple, undistinguished wine is picked by multiple judges as a standout in its class, over presumably stiff competition?
This is pure conjecture, but wouldn’t it have to be one of these reasons?
1. The system of judging failed. Maybe the judges had tried too many wines that day, or disagreed heavily over more controversial wines that were either very oaky, unoaked, too heavy with malolactic or something, so the only wine they could agree that they all liked was the most innocuous one. I think this happens frequently in big competitions with multiple judges.
2. The judges themselves were not up to the task. Maybe not enough of them had experience with great Chardonnay, or maybe it happened to be a group prejudiced against high-alcohol or even against Chardonnay in general.
3. The samples sent to the competition were not the same wine that I tried in the blind tasting. This is probably true in a very straightforward sense, because with millions of cases of Two-Buck Chuck being sold, it can’t all have been blended from exactly the same base wines in the same proportions in the same tank.
Wineries like the medal-awarding fairs and competitions, because they don’t want critics like Wine Enthusiast, Robert Parker and Wine Spectator to have all the power to influence consumers. I understand that, and think that the fairs give an alternative, more populist kind of analysis of wine quality that’s probably more in tune with the average American consumer’s palate. Various vintners have told me that a silver or gold medal significantly boosts sales, especially in their tasting rooms, because it’s a third-party endorsement that people who’ve never heard of Steve Heimoff or Robert Parker understand.
Results like the Two-Buck Chuck double gold, however, have got to undermine the credibility of these medals for anyone who thinks it through.
Have you ever blind-tasted Two-Buck Chuck?
Filed under: Critics/Competitions
15 Comments
July 11th, 2007 at 7:42:33 AM
Hi Jim, interesting post. It is no secret that wine competitions, ratings and all forms of judging generally throw up some suprises and certainly create a lot of controversy. However the limited inconsistencies are usually emphasised and berated by wineries that do not find success. While ‘two-buck chuck’ might have had a brief glimpse of the spotlight, it is not common that this disparity occurs and – eventually – the cream will float to the top. Top wineries become top wineries because they consistently outperform – in any environment!
July 11th, 2007 at 12:28:58 PM
I’ve definitely questioned the same thing when I have tasted “award winning” or medal receiving wines that made me wonder how bad the competition was for them to have received top accolades. I have often wondered myself what the criteria is, who the tasters are; I would love to think that different conditions and different palates could account for poor wines showing better than they are in a tasting, but this can’t be the case or there wouldn’t be so many undeserving medal wining wines.
In this case, I find it strange that the wine was picked over the others because I was under the impression the whole point of two buck chuck was a pleasant enough drinking wine on the cheap.
If this wine received the double gold, well good for it. I think the end result will be a watering down of the importance of medal designations in the eyes of consumers.
July 11th, 2007 at 2:19:14 PM
If I was a conspiracy theorist…..
July 11th, 2007 at 2:32:09 PM
i’ve been to the california state fair on many occasions and i think the 112 degree weather got the best of the judges. there’s no way anyone who tastes and enjoys wine on a regular basis could think the 2 buck chuck is a double gold winner. drinkable, yes. (especially in the baking valley of sacramento) award winning? nope. sorry. sell crazy somewhere else
July 12th, 2007 at 5:35:08 AM
Maybe they need a 2 buck chuck reserve for 4 dollars! Why is it so hard to believe that a professional winery is capable of making a great wine? I have tasted some supposed great wine’s and spit them out due to either being flat or over oaked and why does price matter if its good its good. I guess it goes back to keeping up with the Jones’s or ridding a moped!
July 12th, 2007 at 12:35:10 PM
I’ve certainly wondered with some of these “Gold Medal” winners if judging aspects focused on things like: Color of Bottle Glass, Adhesion of Label to Bottle, Strength of Cardboard Case, and the like… since the wine can sometimes just be freaking terrible.
July 12th, 2007 at 5:05:13 PM
I think you raise solid possibilities for explaining the medal. As for your own blind tasting, I’m not surprised that 2 Buck scored well. I think a large portion of consumers’ palates are shaped by wines in the $4-$8 range, and so 2 Buck would likely have fit the taste preferences of a majority of the sampling group (though you did have a few others in that price range as well). Could the order of tasting play a part – residual taste impacting subsequent tastings? Was there a consistent pattern in the wine ranking based on the order in which the wines were tasted?
July 12th, 2007 at 8:54:15 PM
This just defies credulity. Using the rules of Critical Thinking, if Mr. Franzia has played fast and loose with various regs in the past, even going to the can for some skullduggery, why should this old dog change his spots now. The judges are top notch; they are not the folks who would reward an everyday quaffer with golds. There is simply no quality control in such competitions, making it too tempting to submit wines that can’t be found on the supermarket shelves even though they may have the same label.
Another reason to commend Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, the husband and wife team who write the Friday wine column in the Wall Street Journal. They buy all their samples for their tastings-by-type-of-wine at retail stores in multiple states.
July 13th, 2007 at 4:34:34 PM
I think I’ll create a $1.00 wine, call it “One Greenback Jack”, give my own “World’s Fair Triple Platinum Best of Fair” medal and make a fortune! Yeah…
July 19th, 2007 at 12:39:47 PM
These competitions are losing more and more credibility with me every day …..LOL!
The average consumer would probably love it…that is the truth, of course the avg consumer feels that $10 or $12 is a lot of money for a bottle of Red Wine when you can buy a big box or a jug for $4.49 at Safeway or Albertsons.
August 15th, 2007 at 12:08:15 AM
Good commentary Jim.
My thought is that it’s really a shame that state fairs are damaging the reputation of some of the reputable wine competitions. I myself, judge for a number of competitions, and this aforementioned Two Buck Chuck award is simply erroneous and inappropriate and one can only presume fraud at some level. I am not going to point fingers or make any assumptions but something is not right here. On another note, its interesting how the Cornell study about how wine labels ruin a restaurant meal (have you seen it?) and the double gold awards coincide; is this coincidence or was the award used to balance out the (somewhat) bad publicity…
October 9th, 2007 at 6:41:23 PM
I have been a fan of 2-Buck to $20 per bottle for many years. Maybe the reason 2-Buck was chosen is because that is the wine they actually thought was the best. At some point, price has nothing to do with quality but law of supply and demand. If no one values the brilliancy of a diamond, at the end of the day it is a hard hunk of coal.
Once upon a time before today’s varied amount of vodkas that are available, Absolut came out and was THE top shelf spirit. Now it is typically bar stock. Price doesn’t mean it is better, unless of course you are the one who paid more for it.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:13:27 PM
Atom, I notice you do not talk about flavor. The bottom line is that one must defend the wine on its taste.
I had an opportunity to blind-taste several vintages of the Charles Shaw (CH), along side four other chardonnays (two which were comparable in price and two at a slightly higher price structure >$20). I had no knowledge that the award winning two-buck chuck was amongst the flight. Many of the wines displayed nice characteristics, which ranged from simple and straightforward to complex wines that carried distinct uniqueness. After scoring, the director revealed the wines; I scored the CH “gold winner” the lowest score of the bunch because it lacked character. Looking back at my notes, the only thing I had to say about the wine was that it lacked character and had an unpleasant aroma.
I agree with Jim’s #3 statement above; several other wine publication editors agree with us on this point – if you honestly believe the bottles of wine the judges tasted are the same the ones you and I buy in the store, you are living in a dream world.
May 4th, 2008 at 5:50:04 AM
I agree with Pamela at #9 — the bottle of 2005 CH Chard is not the same one you’d find in Trader Joe’s. But that’s because he deals in such huge quantities, sourcing grapes from all over, that “batch variation” is simply part of the CH experience… are we really all so cynical to chalk it up to conspiracy theories? Does no one actually want to acknowledge that — god forbid — a bulk wine producer who sources big ripe fruit from Central Valley actually managed to create a tasty, decent wine? Maybe it was lightning in a bottle, maybe it won’t happen again next year, but can we all really be sure this wasn’t just a solid vintage of CH Chard? As the old adage reminds us, if you put a bunch of monkeys at typewriters, eventually they’ll write Shakespeare…
October 16th, 2010 at 1:17:26 PM
2buck chuck is a hero wine for all the folks who can`t afford even a $10 bottle of wine.after bustin` their butt all week a $2 bottle of merlot with a steak ain`t bad.so let the freek flag fly where it wants…….