(SacBee) - With December upon us, it’s time to get a jump on the next New Year’s resolutions. At the top of my list: Start a wine competition. Why not? They’re popping up all over the place. I just scanned the results for the International Wine Channel TV Awards, a competition for wines, not shows. Who knew?

More to the point, why not grab some of what might seem easy money? I just finished a two-year stint as a chief judge for the California State Fair’s commercial and home wine competitions. I know the money isn’t easy. Nevertheless, it’s there.

Competitions typically charge wineries at least $50 per entry. Wineries also customarily submit three to six bottles of each wine they enter. Larger competitions generally draw 1,000 to 2,000 entries, a couple 4,000 to nearly 6,000.

There’s money to be made there, all right, even aside from expenses such as judges’ travel, dining and lodging. Then there’s the cost of medals, and the investment in publishing results and staging follow-up tastings. Wait a minute, wineries often pay a premium to take advantage of all that, too.

What would I do to distinguish my wine competition? For starters:

▪ Provide a full accounting of revenues and expenditures. Both are huge, at least for larger competitions, but I can’t think of a one that provides an audit to disclose how much money comes in and where it goes. With some competitions, revenues ostensibly go for student scholarships and various philanthropic programs. Great, but let’s see how much. And the bottles of wine, where do they end up? Granted, many are given to volunteers, who earn every one, and some go to nonprofits to help in fundraising, but how about some verification for each bottle that isn’t opened and used during the competition itself?

▪ Several wine competitions are earnest about recruiting new judges, but more can be done. What’s needed is a demanding mentor/protégé program to bring promising recruits onto the circuit, hopefully with the guidance of sensory scientists at UC Davis, perhaps modeled on standards used to train judges in Australia, where competitions and their conclusions seem to be more respected than they are in the United States.