Blind Tasted: Our New Insight Series

It’s about how The IEWA competition really works.

Wine competitions can look mysterious from the outside. Wines and money go in. Medals come out. Somewhere in between, judges disappear into a room and re-emerge sometime later looking exhilirated, drained and hungry.

At IEWA, we taste everything blind. Labels out of sight. Preconceptions parked. The wine has to speak for itself - a bit like a dish on MasterChef, minus the cameras, the ticking clock, and with more secure trousers.

Blind Tasted is where I’ll explain what actually goes on.

This series isn’t about dissecting individual medal wins, or congratulating ourselves on results. It’s about sharing insight into how wine competitions work, how judging decisions are made, and what blind tasting can reveal about English wine as a category.

I’ll talk about:

• How IEWA judging works, and why it’s structured the way it is

• What blind tasting tells us about progress, consistency, and confidence in English wine

• How styles evolve year to year, sometimes subtly, sometimes not

• What competitions can (and can’t) tell producers, buyers, and drinkers

Wine awards are often treated as a final verdict. In reality, they’re part of a much bigger conversation about quality, direction of travel, and credibility. As much as it must attempt to do so, blind tasting doesn’t remove all subjectivity, but it does strip away noise. I’m happy to add in some of the noise here.

Everything here is shaped by experience running an awards programme, at the judging table, discussion between judges, and patterns seen over time - not by clichéd trends, marketing narratives, or headline-grabbing results.

You may not agee with some of my musings, but if this series makes The IEWA feel a little less opaque, and more accountable and trustworthy - a little more human, even - then it’s doing its job.

Blind Tasted: Where the hype ends, and a wine stands on its own merit and articulates itself. A metaphor for this blog that feels more than a little over-extracted, but you probably see what I’m going for.

See you in May for IEWA26 - our tenth competition!

Alex Taylor
Founder, IEWA

‘If a wine can’t speak for itself, then blind tasting will find it out’