# What a competition medal tells you

A medal on a bottle is one of the few pieces of information on an airport shelf that did not come from the people selling it. That makes it worth reading properly: what the judges actually did, what the award covers, and how much weight a shopper should give it.

## Blind tasting, by panel

A serious spirits or wine competition judges blind. Bottles are decanted or masked, entries are grouped so like is judged against like, and a panel of several judges scores each one independently before discussing it. The panel is drawn from people who taste for a living: buyers, makers, writers, sommeliers. Nobody on the panel knows whose bottle is in the glass while they are scoring it.

That design is the whole value of the exercise. It removes the label, the packaging and the reputation, and leaves the liquid.

## A medal is awarded against a standard, not a rank

Most competitions award to an absolute standard rather than ranking entries against each other. A category can produce several golds or none. So a gold does not mean best in the shop; it means the panel judged this bottle to meet a high standard on the day. Higher tiers, where a competition has them, are awarded by a second round among the medal winners.

## What it does not tell you

It does not tell you the bottle is good value, because judging is blind to price. It does not tell you that you will like it, because a panel's consensus is not your palate. It does not cover every bottle on the shelf, because entry is voluntary and a producer that did not enter has no medal rather than a poor one. And it attaches to a specific expression and often a specific year of entry, not to everything the distillery makes.

## How to use one

Treat a medal as an independent second opinion that costs you nothing to read. Where two bottles are close on price and you know neither, the medal is a reasonable tie breaker. Where a bottle is unfamiliar and the name means nothing to you, a medal from a competition that judges blind is a much better signal than the shelf talker beside it.

We show the medals from the Professor's own wine and spirits competitions beside the price, where the bottle on the shelf is the bottle that was judged. Matching a medal to a bottle is done conservatively on purpose: a medal on the wrong expression is worse than a medal missing, so where the match is not certain we show nothing. [See the award winners](/awards).

## Then check the price separately

The medal answers what is in the bottle. The price is a different question, and the answer moves by airport and by month. [Compare the shops on your route](/savings), and read the date beside each figure.