For reasons that escape me, only a minority of wine writers try their hand at making their own. Can you imagine a food writer who hasn’t ever cooked anything? Getting your hands dirty, appreciating all the manual labor involved, having to worry about rainfall at harvest time and microbes in your garage every day, solving problems, dumping utterly unredeemable wine in the gutter from time to time, and making some bottles that are drop-dead delicious—all these experiences enrich any writer’s understanding of wine and the lives of the people who make it.

Home winemakers soon discover that their friends always think their wines are terrific – because they want to be nice, and because they want to keep getting free wine. So for a reality check, it’s instructive to enter your wines into competitions, where what you put in the bottle gets evaluated by a panel of total strangers, in the company of a couple dozen other similar wines.

The photo on the right gives some indication of what happened when we started submitting wines to competitions at subterranean cellars. We done good. We have a corkboard full of Gold Medals and Blue Ribbons, some Double Golds, and three Best of Shows from a combination of the Alameda County Fair, the Marin County Fair, the Napa Town and Country Fair, the Sonoma Harvest Fair, the Orange County Fair and the California State Fair, awarded to red, white, pink and dessert wines made from a long list of grape varieties.

Competition judges can be wildly inconsistent, and amateur judges even more so, but the upshot is still clear: we make pretty darn good wine over here at sub cellars.