smithy wrote:8) You keen Campbell?
10 judges no conferring addem up and averagem
Glad you like the concept,
Nobody has ever accused me of marketing genius before.
Ever!!!!!!!!!!!!
Cheers
Smithy
Smithy
If you're going ahead with this, then I suspect the following would be good ideas
1) Exclude yourself from judging - run the organisation of the event and even the publicity and remove all suggestion of bias. Some people (including myself

) give a big

whenever you get up on the pulpit, so making yourself a neutral facilitator would avoid some of the

from the bleachers
2) Why not make it a big red wine show, with no restriction on alcohol. It gives more credibility to the arguments re: all things in balance. Ok it risks a good 14%alc winner, but you sound happy to take that chance.
3) Do consider trying to get Wine Spec or the like on board. Whilst I don't share the "US palate", this sort of thing is right up their street and could win a few entrants some big o/seas orders. Get them on board and you'll get plenty of entrants.
3a) Why not invite selected US entrants (or even slot them in yourself). They're the other country regularly hitting big alcohol levels and maybe linked with wine spec or the like, a few US wines slotted in might pique their interest.
4) A straight average whilst seemingly fair, can cause issues and if you follow ice-skating (

) then you'll be aware they discard the highest and lowest values and average the rest. This stops one judge giving extreme values and dominating the results over those that apply a finer scale of marking. e.g Judge 1 votes 19.6 for wineA and 12.2 for wineB. Judges 2-5 award 18.2, 18.6, 18.3, 18.2 for wine A and 18.9, 18.7, 18.7, 18.6 for wineB. Wine A wins when only one judge out of 5 preferred it.
5) Current release or any wine? Most producers will send current wine, but what about a museum class or two (to consider how many big wines age well)
6) No point doing fortifieds as these are covered adequately elsewhere and I don't believe you've ever claimed bias here.
7) Ensure you have full press support, which I imagine is pretty full-on effort-wise.

Have a think about any current part of the wine show circuit you object to (unfinished wines, chairmans instructions, proliferation of meaningless medals, etc) Your chance to have a gentle (or not so gentle) dig at them.
9) Aim for less wines tasted per session than other shows. It would be plain stupid to ignore the effect of an extra 2-4% alc on average.
regards
Ian