Want to amaze yourself and your friends with your grasp of the more technical aspects of wine? No? How about being able to foil those wine snobs who are making your life hell?  No!? Well this is awkward, we went to a lot of trouble getting Fred Peacock to explain wine shows and a few of the more technical terms you hear bandied about at them.

How do wine shows work?

As a result of our articles on the recent Hobart International Wine Show we have received a few emails along the "I don't get it" line so we thought we would try to help those punters and the rest of you understand the arcane ritual that is the wine show.  Now hold on because we are entering the technical end of the business and be warned this is where your average wine nerd goes to play.

Since our knowledge of this area is pretty rudimentary we enlisted the help of Fred Peacock from Bream Creek (or as he is now known "Winepunters own Fred Peacock" - Ed), who by the way had a very successful show.  We caught up with him at his warehouse on a very busy day so there is a lot of noise in the background as everyone wanted to make sure Fred know how hard they were working.  While we are at it, we should thank them for their patience since we took over their tea room for the interview.

After congratulating Fred on his triumph at the 2008 Hobart International Wine Show (such brown nosing is necessary so that people will consent to future interviews - Ed) we asked Fred to go through the judging process.  We have to say that by the end of his explanation we were very impressed with the care and professionalism shown by the people running the show in general and the judging in particular.  The coveted Winepunter bow of approval goes out to all involved.

wineshow_judging.mp3 (5.5mb, 7:54 min)	All you wanted to know about wine judging but were afraid to ask.  Since people like to buy award winning wines it's not a bad thing to understand how these wines are chosen. Don't  worry even though you will learn something,  it's pretty painless and it will happen without you noticing.

Please explain those fancy words

Having completed 'wine judging 101' we wanted to move on to the judging commentary.  Since we didn't expect to get a laugh out of the judges comments in the show catalogue we were very interested in Fred's reaction to them. What we did expect, however, was to be completely bamboozled by some of the terminology so we asked Fred to explain.  What followed wasn't just a dictionary response but a comprehensive explanation which gave us both a good understanding as well as a clear indication of why those terms are important.  If you want to understand winemaking techniques a bit more it is well worth a listen.

wineshow_technical_words.mp3 (9mb, 12:55 min)	Fred navigates the wine nerd frenzy that is the judging commentary and terminology.  You may want to drop some of these terms at your next dinner party (or maybe not - Ed)

Hopefully you now understand terms or phrases like oxidative handling, pholics (aggressive or otherwise), brettanomyces and 'awkward wines'.  Now go forth and impress.  We also hope that we have motivated you to make an effort to go to the public tasting at the 2009 show - you will certainly understand the catalogue a lot more.  But if nothing else these podcasts may help you to dominate at your next wine based quiz night.

What do you think?  Send us a comment