The Australian Wine Research Institute

Founded in 1992, the Advanced Wine Assessment Course (AWAC) is an intensive four-day course designed for participants with considerable formal wine tasting experience. It aims to prepare potential new wine show judges and develop the sensory analysis capabilities and the vocabulary of Australian wine industry personnel at an elite level.

The AWAC is presented under a four-day format, which includes approximately 40 hours of activities over four days. Twelve leading wine show judges, journalists and winemakers assist in the presentation of the course.

The aims of the course include:

• providing training in the techniques and practices of wine show judging
• investigating and challenging the criteria on which tasters make decisions on wine quality and preference
• improving participants’ ability to communicate clearly and effectively with other judges and to justify their reasoning for allocating wines at different quality levels
• improving participants’ appreciation and recognition of different wine styles, blends or regional character
• providing a statistical evaluation of tasting performance with respect to:
  • discrimination – the degree to which wines of different quality levels are separated based on quality score
  • reliability – a measure of scoring consistency, or the ability of a judge to reproduce results on different tasting occasions
  • absolute average difference – a more straightforward measure of consistency – the average difference between scores given to wines on repeat tastings
  • stability – a measure of propensity to systematically score wines higher or lower on the second tasting relative to the first

General hygiene measures: 
To ensure the safety of all participants, additional spacing and hygiene measures will be put in place to comply with government health guidelines and social distancing requirements. Additional information on hygiene requirements for wine judging and tasting processes can be found in the ASVO Wine Show Best Practice Recommendations Addendum 1 (2020).