I had some really good organically grown and biodynamic wines Monday, but I can’t tell you what they were.

Actually, I later found out what a couple of them were, but when I was trying them, they were numbers rather than names. I was a judge for the second International Green Wine Competition in Santa Rosa, Calif. It was my first foray into judging, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The judges were divided into two panels, each of which rated about 100 wines. Our group awarded four golds and a slew of silvers and bronzes, and found only two wines not worth recognizing.

Here’s how it worked: We did the reds in the morning, when our palates were fresher, and the whites after lunch. We were presented with flights of the same varietal or blend, each with a three- or four-digit numeral on an attached card. We took as long as we needed to sample — I went through each flight once, taking notes, then backwards through it again, sometimes adjusting my grade. The grades were G for gold, S for silver, B for bronze and N for “no-way-no-how anyone should buy this swill” (or something like that).  As it was back in school days, we often appended a plus or minus to the grade.

The final designation was the average of the grades. If that couldn’t be readily determined, we’d talk about the wine, and someone would raise or lower a grade to get us to a semi-consensus.

To earn a Double Gold, a wine had to get G’s from all the judges; that didn’t happen in our group. To earn a “no medal,” though, only one of us had to vote that way — and then convince the others that this wine deserved no medal. If we were headed that way, we’d ask for another bottle of the same wine, just to be sure. We all agreed on one seriously flawed wine, and I won the panel over on a sauvignon blanc that had an overwhelming cat-pee aroma. (There’s nothing wrong with that being part of the bouquet, but not to this litterbox-esque degree.)

The other judges on my panel were fun and smart. Jim Caudill is a Kendall-Jackson veteran who runs a PR company in Santa Rosa. Jil Child plans and coordinates personalized excursions with Wine Treks of the World. And Amy Atwood has a swell blog “with an organic bent” called MyDailyWine.

Here’s the really good news: Jil was a judge last year and said that this year’s lot was ”probably 75 percent better” than the 2008 entries. I have noticed an improvement in wines with organically grown grapes as well.

I moseyed over to the coordinators’ space after we were done to identify two wines I had particularly liked; turns out they were an Alma Rosa pinot noir and a white blend from Oregon’s Montinore winery called Borealis, which was primarily muller thurgau (one of my new favorite grapes).

The medalists will be posted at the competition’s website next week.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.