The 2008 competition marks the 24^th year of The Dallas Morning News Wine Competition. The first competition was held in March of 1985 at the Hyatt Regency Dallas. That first year we invited 15 judges to evaluate the 570 entries we received. For our first 14 years the competition was open only to wines produced in the United States. In 1999 we opened the competition to wines produced in all wine regions of the world. That year we received 1,783 entries. For the 2007 competition we received 3,322 entries from 24 states and 16 countries.

Over the years we have developed an eager following of the results especially in north central Texas. It did not happen overnight. We have always printed a listing of the award winning wines, but the first four years of the competition it was just a list. The first special section of the award winning wines distributed in the newspaper was 1989. Readers of The Dallas Morning News make the publication listing the award winning wines their buying guide for months after its release. Retailers and restaurateurs buy and promote the award winning wines.

The first year of judging we were able to set up all the wines in one small meeting room. Our database was a spreadsheet. We set up all the categories by hand. With only 570 wines, it was not very complex. Ralph Hutchinson, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona who was the cellar master of the LA County Fair until his untimely death in 1987 helped organize the back room. We finished the judging on a Thursday and announced the awards the following Saturday.

It was very clear after that first year that a spreadsheet was not adequate for keeping up with all the entries and awards. Over the years our database program has grown and evolved to better serve the judging process. Since the 2003 competition, we have used hand held computers to record the judges results, then downloaded each panel's results into our database.

Getting bigger every year is great, but it makes it more difficult to find a place big enough to handle the judging. For 2008 we will again be at the Dallas Convention Center.

A good competition depends upon qualified judges. We invite people who work with wine on a daily basis; restaurateurs, wine stewards, retail wine buyers, wine and food writers, enologists, as well as a few very knowledgeable consumers. We try to assemble each judging panel with a mix of those disciplines so different viewpoints will be considered in the evaluation of the wines.

Equally important is the organization of what we call the backroom. This is where we set up all the wines to be judged. We make every effort to ensure that each wine is properly identified and labeled with the code number it was assigned when it was entered in the database.