No mention of Riverside, former West Coast, L.A., S.F. and their winners. Do hope you'll reconsider on this. Anyway, Jerry, love your newsletter, your enthusiasm and your remarks. From their perspective, the New World International or the Orange County Fair are just additional competition, and most people don't plug their competitors. These publications want to be your only source of wine recommendations.
Most wine writers are basically the same.
Then there's the writers who run wine competitions, but won't write about their own for fear of appearing to have a conflict of interest, and they damn sure aren't going to write about someone else's if they aren't writing about their own. But as amazing as it may sound, being one of the few national media outlets for competition information and results, I don't always get all the cooperation I need to do my job. I have had results embargoed for weeks, even months, waiting for some public announcement in the competition's hometown, meaning that by the time I get the info and what with publication lead times as great as three months, by the time I could report the results they would be really stale. A number of shows no longer publish awards books, and since I can publish so few awards from any given show, I'm hesitant to mention any when I don't have a way to tell folks how to get the complete results. Whether we'll be able to continue to offer the wide variety of competition results that we have in the past is rather up in the air at the moment.