AN INTERNATIONAL PANEL OF JUDGES WEIGHS IN ON NEW JERSEY WINES.
ON JULY 19, 2025, an international panel of 12 world-class wine judges came to New Jersey to taste and evaluate New Jersey wines with select examples to be included in the first annual Terroir New Jersey Wine Showcase.
The Showcase was conceived by several New Jersey wineries who wanted an independent perspective outside the traditional wine competition model and a platform to collectively promote the best of what New Jersey has to offer. This was decidedly NOT a wine competition. If a wine was evaluated by the judges to be excellent, based on consideration of over 15 quality factors, it would be designated as a Showcase wine. All New Jersey wineries were encouraged to submit wines made from any kind of fruit so long as it was 100% New Jersey grown. Martin Moran, one of only 421 Masters of Wine in the entire world, flew in from Dublin to judge in this Showcase and put it succinctly: If your goal is to show what New Jersey fruit alone can produce, “It would be insane to do it any other way.” The sense of place is the very thing that makes wine special and so different from beer and spirits.
The organizers gave the judges several very specific instructions for the review process:
- Be hard on us. We don’t want inflated scores and we don’t want to be told that this is “good for being from New Jersey.” We want to be evaluated against the world, not just ourselves. A wine should only be designated a Showcase wine if it is world-class.
- Only those wines that are excellent—those that in a competition would be deemed platinum or gold level—should be considered Showcase wines.
- Write tasting notes and comments for all the wines—especially for the wines that don’t qualify as Showcase wines. Because next year and the year after, we will work to get them to that level—and be so much better for it.
The evaluating was done in the blind and in panels of three judges. New Jersey Secretary of Agriculture Ed Wengryn sat in on one panel as a guest observer and tasted along with the experts. In all, 132 wines were tasted and notes written for every one. It was difficult and painstaking work for the judges, but they understood—and I think very much admired—our motivation.
In the end, 68 wines were judged to be Showcase quality. And, were this a competition, all 132 contenders would have won a medal of some kind.
The judges said they had never had an experience like this one—and these are experienced professionals who have each judged hundreds of competitions all over the world. That is pretty amazing. Unlike in a competition setting, they weren’t just picking winners and losers. Here, it was judging with a purpose. As Secretary Wengryn noted, “All participants received feedback on what was good and could be improved to make their wine better. This is a step forward in improving New Jersey wine quality even as we celebrated the exceptional wines showcased.”
The Terroir New Jersey Wine Showcase rewrote the rules of the old wine competition model and, in so doing, innovated a new and cooperative way to promote the potential greatness of a wine region. An added plus: “The feedback I received from the international panel of judges was that they are all now ambassadors of New Jersey wine,” said Secretary Wengryn.
“This state has a great future in winemaking,” said Martin Moran. He went on to quite possibly come up with our wine region’s new motto when he observed, to quote Sinatra: “You should be saying, ‘New Jersey wine—We do it our way.’”
