(TimAtkin) - Hello! And welcome to So You Wanna Be a Wine Judge.Com!, your online wine judge certification program. Once you complete this simple online course, you’ll be completely qualified to judge in any wine competition in the world! You may even be overqualified. It’s a little-known fact that proven wine knowledge is not required to be a wine judge at many major wine competitions. Believe it or not, it’s actually frowned upon! Expert opinions are overrated, tiresome, and unwelcome where real people judge wine. What is required? You’re about to find out! Let’s begin.

Lesson 1: How Wine Competitions Work

Wine producers are solicited by wine competitions to submit wines for judging. The winery pays a fee for every wine submitted to be judged. The fees are paid upfront. This is contrary to wines submitted for professional review, which are provided for free in the hope of securing a high rating from an influential critic. The winery pays later for those submissions, either for advertising, the picture of the label being published alongside the review, or for pouring their highly-rated wines at the publications “Experiences”. The difference between entering a wine for competition versus submitting a wine for a professional review is, then, essentially the same as the difference between prostitution and marriage. It’s about when payment is due.

Paying to have your wine judged in a wine competition guarantees you will get a fair shake, or your money back! Think of wine competitions as the Oprah Winfrey of wine. “You get a medal! You get a medal! And you get a medal! EVERYBODY gets a medal!” And then you can gloat about how you got a medal!