Measuring the overlap between three wine competitions

What we matched

We placed award records from three competitions side by side. The Japan Wine Competition is a domestic competition for Japanese wine. The International Wine Challenge brings wines from around the world into an international judging framework. The SAKURA Awards is an international wine competition judged by women working in Japan’s wine industry. In each case, the item being judged is an entered wine, not a producer as a whole.

We preserved those differences while matching the producer and winery names in each published result to the producer IDs used on this site. When one producer has awards for several wines, it is still counted once when we examine overlap between producers. That is why the table separates the number of award records from the number of producers with an award.

What the table means

“Unique to it” means that a producer appears in at least one award record for that competition and does not appear in the other two competitions in our matching results. It does not mean that the competition alone recognised the producer, or that the producer did not enter elsewhere. It means only that the producer ID appears in one side of this comparison within the published results we checked.

The final row combines the three competitions without counting the same producer twice. As the table shows, most producers listed on this site do not appear in the award records covered here. The useful distinction is between the set of producers with an award and the wider set of producers making Japanese wine.

Beyond the awards

Our reading: Entering a competition involves applications, choosing entries, preparing samples, and shipping them, all of which take money and time. A producer may decide not to enter, or to choose a particular competition for reasons unrelated to quality. Awards are useful third-party evaluations of the wines entered, but the absence of an award is not evidence against a wine’s quality.

To go further, use the competition award archive to check which producer, wine, and result are recorded. If you want to start with grapes, follow the variety index. Each producer page also links its award records to the sources we checked.