The 2010 competition will be the 26th year of The Dallas Morning News Wine Competition. The first competition was held in March of 1985 at the Hyatt Regency Dallas. That first year we invited 15 judges to evaluate the 570 entries we received. For our first 14 years the competition was open only to wines produced in the United States. In 1999 we opened the competition to wines produced in all wine regions of the world. That year we received 1,783 entries. For the 2009 competition we received 3,146 entries from 28 states and 18 countries. This number was lower than the entries we received in 2008, but considering the economy, we were delighted with the number of entries.
Over the years we have developed an eager following of the results especially in
north central Texas. It did not happen overnight. We have always printed a listing
of the award winning wines, but the first four years of the competition it was just
a list. The first special section of the award winning wines distributed in the
newspaper was 1989. Readers of The Dallas Morning News make the publication listing
the award winning wines their buying guide for months after its release. Retailers
and restaurateurs buy and promote the award winning wines.
The first year of judging we were able to set up all the wines in one small meeting
room. Our database was a spreadsheet. We set up all the categories by hand. With
only 570 wines, it was not very complex. The late Ralph Hutchinson, a professor
at Cal Poly Pomona and cellar master of the LA County Fair helped organize the back
room. We finished the judging on a Thursday and announced the awards the following
Saturday.
It was very clear after that first year that a spreadsheet was not adequate for
keeping up with all the entries and awards. Over the years our database program
has grown and evolved to better serve the judging process. Today, several wine competitions
use our web-based program at
www.enofileonline.com to manage their judgings.
Getting bigger every year is great, but it makes it more difficult to find a place
big enough to handle the judging. For the 2010 competition we will again be at the
Dallas Convention Center.
A good competition depends upon qualified judges. We invite people who work with
wine on a daily basis; restaurateurs, wine stewards, retail wine buyers, wine and
food writers, enologists, as well as a few very knowledgeable consumers. We try
to assemble each judging panel with a mix of those disciplines so different viewpoints
will be considered in the evaluation of the wines.
Equally important is the organization of what we call the backroom. This is where
we set up all the wines to be judged. A mostly volunteer staff of 60 works to ensure
that each wine is properly identified and labeled with the code number it was assigned
when it was entered in the database. As you can see from the photos this is a formidable
job. We work diligently to ensure that we put the right wine in the right glass
at the right time to be sure every wine is properly and fairly judged.