Taste to taste: Colorado wine pros value gold from the Colorado Mountain Winefest.

• Author: Smith, Alta

It's 9 a.m. in mid-September, and 10 judges are sitting at tables in a hotel conference room in Grand Junction, facing the prospect of tasting about 175 wines by the end of the day. That may sound like fun to some people, but to the judges it is work--a lot of work that ends with a half dozen or so wines being given gold medals in the Colorado Mountain Winefest, the state's largest and longest-running wine festival.

Does anyone care?

Should Colorado wineries care?

What does it mean if a wine gets a gold medal?

The Colorado Mountain Winefest has been held annually in Palisade for 15 years. The first year, 1991, the festival was co-chaired by Doug Phillips, owner of Plum Creek Cellars and then chair of the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board. It drew six wineries and a few hundred curious attendees to Veterans Park in Palisade.

This year's fest, held from Sept. 14 through Sept. 17, drew nearly 6,000 people to the larger Riverbend Park in Palisade, and 40-plus entrant wineries (out of more than 60 wineries in the state).

Look at the Winefest's website, www.coloradowinefest.com, and you see that the four-day festival is all about tasting food and wine, music, fun and experiencing Colorado's emergent wine country. For winemakers, though, the fest is also about competition: the chance to put their creations up against other wines produced in Colorado, to measure how they measure up.

During the first years of the festival, the only competition offered was for amateurs, where contestants received awards but more importantly were offered judges' comments to help them improve their winemaking. It wasn't until 2002 that a wine competition, Best of Fest, pitting Colorado winemakers against each other, was added; today, after five contests, those professional vintners have a variety of opinions about going taste-to-taste with each other.

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"I think for the medal winners," says Doug Caskey, executive director of the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board, "it helps their sales." Caskey, who chose the judges for the competition this year, wanted three panels of three judges each, plus a 10th judge to float between panels giving the other tasters an occasional break. Caskey says he wanted a mix of wine backgrounds, talent and experience in his judging panels. They included a consulting oenologist, a wine retailer, five wine writers (including Alta Smith, a writer of this piece), two wine magazine editors, an International Wine Guild judge, and Caskey himself. Organizers of the fest, the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Association of Vintners and Viticulturists, also recruited members of the Connecticut chapter of the American Wine Society to set up and run the wine competitions, adding another level of impartiality to the results. Most of the same judges who judged the professional competition also judged the amateurs. "Overall," Caskey said of the contests, "it provides an assessment. Even if they didn't win, they can see the judges' comments and learn from them."

The local pros themselves have a wide range of opinions about in-state competition and its value to their wineries.

Rick Turley, owner of the state's oldest winery, Colorado Cellars in Palisade, has won medals in every Winefest competition, including nine in this year's judging. He says the medals are more important for newer wineries...