We’re coming down the home stretch for the 2008 San Diego International Wine Competition, but there remains a great deal of work behind the scenes as we prepare for the April 19-20 event.
Over the Easter weekend we processed the more than 1000 wine entries that came in just last week alone. These photos show members of the SDIWC cellar crew hard at work opening boxes, sticking coded reference labels on each wine and tucking them away in the appropriate slots so they can be easily accessed the weekend of the competition.
Most wine judges — who evaluate the competition wines “blind” — know very little about this aspect of the process. They show up, sit down and are served glasses of wine with coded stickers that correspond to actual bottles of wine in the back room.
The cellar crew makes this happen seemingly effortlessly, although the process is anything but. By the time the competition rolls around the cellar crew will have touched more than 10,000 bottles of wine, placing each bottle in its proper slot on its way to the judging.
It’s not rocket science, but it does require tremendous attention to detail from our volunteers on the cellar crew. I salute them!
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