110 WINE STING

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SUPERMARKET WINE WINS GOLD MEDAL IN BIG WINE COMPETITION

The judges of the prestigious Gilbert et Gaillard international wine competition were tricked into awarding this year’s gold medal to a €2.50 (USD$2.70) supermarket wine that the expert judges called “exceptional.”

Ever wonder how the average person chooses wine at a supermarket? Well, it turns out that having one or more medals on the bottle can increase sales by up to 15 percent, so it is no wonder that winemakers take wine-tasting competitions very seriously.

But does winning such medals actually reflect the quality of the wine, or are these contests really just money-making events for the competition sponsors, who charge greedy winemakers hefty sums to enter with the hope of increasing their wine sales?

Eric Boschman, once named Belgium’s best sommelier, and a Belgian consumer magazine decided to find out by taking the worst supermarket wine they could find and registering it in a well-respected wine competition.

The organizers of this sneaky experiment started out by enlisting the help of Eric Boschman, named Belgium’s best sommelier in 1988, and conducting a supermarket wine tasting. There were plenty of wines under €3 to choose from, but they decided to go with the cheapest and worst-tasting one they could find.

A €2.50 bottle was selected and then disguised as a premium product named “Chateau Colombier.” They created a more eye-catching label and invented a story for the wine, claiming it was made from grape varieties located in Côtes de Sambre and Meuse (Belgium).

The scammers had dozens of wine contests to choose from, but they chose Gilbert et Gaillard, a competition that awards medals every three months. Participants must pay a €50 (USD$55) entrance fee, send samples for tasting, and provide laboratory data, such as the alcohol and sugar levels. Luckily, this last requirement was easily bypassed, since competition organizers very rarely double-check the data submitted by the winemakers.

To increase their chances of getting a good placement in the wine contest, the scam team sent in the lab data of another, truly high-quality wine, and, just as they suspected, no one at the competition bothered to check whether it was genuine.

Boschman also started praising the €2.50 wine as “great” to fellow sommeliers and wine enthusiasts, betting on the fact that many of them tend to be influenced by their peers and just follow the crowd.

In the end, the prank worked like a charm. The €2.50 wine won the gold medal at the most recent Gilbert et Gaillard international competition, with the judges describing it as “smooth and fresh with clean, young scents that promise a nice complexity--very interesting.”

Along with the award announcement, the competition’s organizers notified the winners that they could buy 1,000 gold stickers to display on their wine labels for just another €60.

After proving their point that “gold medals” on wine may mean very little, the Belgian consumer magazine warned consumers not to assume that all wine gold medals are created equal. Some competitions are more professional than others, but many are just run as money-making businesses.