Wine evaluation is one of the primary activities of French Broad Vignerons. Many our members have been trained in wine evaluation since 2010. They can sit down with a small pour of wine and evaluate appearance, nose and taste, and make a highly informed judgment about the wine. Our trained competition judges do the same thing with even more precision.

We feature regular wine evaluation training and tasting experiences. An important part of that process is the dialogue that occurs about all the wine that is tasted informally or after formal judging.

The stages of the process of evaluation are:

For competition judging we use a 20-point scale. All of our competition evaluators are trained in the use of this evaluative criteria. We have implemented head judge and table captain components for competitions, and carefully control and monitor the conditions for all formal wine tasting. The conditions are as follows:

• All tasting will be blind with only the wine varietal/type and vintage year known
• All palates will be clear for at least two hours before an evaluation
• Fragrances will not be worn
• No interaction between evaluators will occur until the judging of a wine is concluded
• All evaluators will be trained in-house by AWS certified International Wine Judges
• All glasses used will be our own that are properly washed prior to use
• Palate cleansers will be used between tastings
• Based on our results we have further refined our use of the elements of the Davis card
• Table captains will also be used at our evaluations
• A head judge will supervise, monitor, and plan all evaluations

There is nothing radically new about any of our procedures, but we do seek to maintain uniformity in our evaluations. We do this during training and we also actively dialogue about the wines we use during training and tasting events. In the years to come, we will start expanding our tasting experiences by using an expanded group of wine types and working to identify our most discriminating tasters for use during Benchmark evaluation sessions.