Not to detract from the general point that most alcohol tasting medals are just marketing and not particularly scientific, but this article is kind of misleading.<p>In a lot of alcohol tasting competitions (including Gilbert & Gaillard), the scale actually goes Double Gold, Gold, Silver, Bronze. A gold medal in itself doesn't actually mean what you might think it should (i.e., best in class), it's basically so you can sell stickers to put on bottles to fool buyers who don't know the specifics of how these competitions are scored. Broadly, I would interpret Double Gold as "might be good", Gold as "might not suck", and Silver/Bronze as "probably pretty bad since they're marketing their participation ribbons".<p>An example from the spirits world: the San Francisco Spirits Competition has a 119 page list of results with medals (<a href="https://www.sfspiritscomp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/2020-sfwsc-results-by-class.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.sfspiritscomp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/202...</a>). There's maybe 1-2 Double Golds per page. GABF, the big beer festival, doesn't award Double Golds, but their categories are specific enough that they awarded 100 Gold medals last year.<p>G&G has this wine listed on their site 3 times. I'm not sure which one is accurate, but the scores are from 85-88. Here's what wine-searcher (a big shopping portal/aggregator for wine) says about the distribution of G&G's ratings:<p>"Gilbert & Gaillard's wine scores on Wine-Searcher:
Score range: 85 – 100 points
50% fall between: 86 – 90 points
Average score: 88.5 points"<p>So basically, they rated it as below average on a scale that inflates ratings to the point where almost everything is marketable.<p>Finally, according to G&G's rules, the wines are tasted blind. The article implies that they're not, but doesn't actually say it.<p>"Prior to tasting, they [the wine samples] are placed in identical packaging that conceals their shape and guarantees anonymity."
<a href="https://vigneron.gilbertgaillard.com/ruleChallenge/reglement-en.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://vigneron.gilbertgaillard.com/ruleChallenge/reglement...</a><p>I know nothing about this specific competition, but there's no real need to try to influence a nonblind judge given how the deck is already stacked.