Gold, silver and bronze on champagne: it's not a podium

A gold medal on a bottle of champagne is not first place, and silver and bronze are not second and third. At a wine competition, gold is a threshold: every wine that scores high enough gets one. At the 2026 Decanter World Wine Awards, 924 wines won gold, and around 85 per cent of all entries received a medal. A critic's score is something else, but it too only makes sense once you know who gave it, on what scale and how the wine was tasted.

By Jim Dronk, Master of Champagne. Last updated: 23 September 2026. The figures come from the competitions' own rules and results, the publications' own explanations, and two studies in the Journal of Wine Economics. All sources are listed at the bottom.

The bottle with the gold sticker

You're standing in front of a shelf full of champagne and one bottle jumps out at you. It has a gold medal on it. Your mind is quickly made up: this must be the winner.

That feeling is almost always wrong. Yet many buyers read it that way, and that is exactly the impression such a sticker is meant to create. So let me explain how it really works. Once you know, you'll never buy on the sticker alone again.

Gold is a threshold, not first place

We know gold, silver and bronze from the Olympic Games: first, second, third. A wine competition works differently. A panel of judges tastes blind and assesses each wine on its own merits, usually by awarding points. Any wine that scores above a certain threshold gets gold. Below that comes silver, and at many competitions bronze as well.

At the Decanter World Wine Awards, one of the largest competitions in the world, those thresholds are fixed. This is how that looked in 2026:

Results of the Decanter World Wine Awards 2026, 16,631 wines entered.

The French Concours Général Agricole even puts it in black and white in its rules. There, a medal stands for a level reached, not for a podium with a first, second and third place.

That is why hundreds of wines win gold at a single competition. In 2026 Decanter awarded gold to 924 of the 16,631 wines entered. So "gold" means: judged good enough by the panel. It does not mean: better than all the others.

Who pays, and how many medals there are

Entering costs money. The producer pays an entry fee per wine and sends three or four bottles along with it. In 2026 that was €205 at the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, £172 at Decanter and £149 to £169 at the Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships. If the wine wins, the producer pays for the bottle stickers on top of that.

How many entries then receive a medal varies widely from one competition to the next:

There is a reason for those differences. A French competition whose medals may appear on the label of French wine rewards at most a third of its entries. The Concours Mondial de Bruxelles caps itself at 33 per cent. Decanter and the Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships have no such ceiling. So a medal from one competition means something quite different from a medal from another, even when it is the same colour.

How reliable are the judges?

There is research showing how shaky the foundations can be. At the California State Fair wine competition, from 2005 to 2008 inclusive, the American emeritus professor Robert Hodgson served judges three glasses of the same wine. They were poured from the same bottle and spread across the same flight of thirty wines.

Only about one in ten judges consistently stayed within a single medal band. Another one in ten gave the same wine bronze on one occasion and gold on another.

In a second study he analysed the results of more than 4,000 wines at thirteen US competitions in 2003. Of the wines that were entered in more than three competitions and won gold somewhere, 84 per cent received nothing at all at another competition. Hodgson's own conclusion: whether a wine wins gold is influenced to a large degree by chance.

That research was about American competitions, not champagne. But it shows why a single medal tells you little, and why you are better off looking for a wine that is rated well time and again.

Not every medal is worthless

There are competitions where the judging is blind and careful. Think of the Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships, the Decanter World Wine Awards and the Concours Général Agricole, recognisable by the oak leaf on its medal.

Even there, check exactly which medal is on the bottle. At Decanter, gold (5.6 per cent of wines in 2026) and platinum (1.2 per cent) are genuinely rare. Bronze and silver are anything but. And there too, the rule holds: gold is a threshold, not first place.

The reverse is also true. Established names in particular often choose not to enter, because a disappointing result can cost them dearly. The Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships say on their own website that some of the very best wines are never entered. So a bottle without a sticker tells you nothing about what is inside.

A score is something else

Besides medals, you sometimes see a number, for example "95 points". Usually that is not from a competition but the verdict of a single critic, or, at some publications, of a small panel. The best-known system is the 100-point scale.

That scale does not start at zero. At The Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator, 50 is the lowest score. Almost nothing below 80 points gets published: Wine Enthusiast doesn't review such wines at all, and in 2018 Wine Spectator counted fewer than a hundred of them out of almost 16,000 wines rated. So what you come across is almost always between 80 and 100, usually above 85. Within that range, every point means something.

What is more, the same 95 points does not mean the same thing at every publication:

A score is more transparent than a medal. You know who gave it, on what scale, and there is usually a tasting note to go with it. Wine Enthusiast and Wine Spectator taste blind: the taster does not know who made the wine or what it costs. Decanter's panel tastings are blind too. The three judges know the grape, the region, the vintage and the alcohol level, but not the producer. Not every Decanter score is the result of a blind tasting, but online the magazine always states whether it was.

Well-known names with their own scores are The Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast. Then there are James Suckling, Vinous and, from Britain, Decanter and Jancis Robinson. Whether the wines are tasted blind varies by critic and by tasting. Robert Parker started The Wine Advocate in 1978, at first under a different name. Together with Wine Spectator, the publication made the 100-point scale the standard. Parker retired in 2019. The letters "RP" next to a score now refer to Robert Parker Wine Advocate as a publication, not to Parker himself.

Jancis Robinson uses a different scale: twenty points instead of a hundred. For her, a 17 is "superior" and an 18 is "a cut above superior". She wrote in 2002 that the vast majority of her scores fall between 15 and 18.5. So never compare her marks directly with a 100-point score.

Take a high score with a pinch of salt too

The moment a hundred points show up, everyone gets carried away. Usually it is a good wine. Usually.

I have had better bottles than some wines carrying a sky-high number. That says nothing about the taster, and nothing about that wine either. It says taste is yours, and nobody else's. A score is a fine starting point for a choice. It is not a final verdict on what you enjoy.

At our own house as well

Two examples from our own cellar, because the questions above apply just as much to the bottles we sell.

The first one is good news. Régis Poissinet was awarded 96 points by Wine Enthusiast this year for the L'Émergente and 95 for the Terre d'Irizée. Wine Enthusiast tastes blind, so the taster did not know whose wine it was or what it costs. And these are his entry-level champagnes, not the prestige cuvée everything hangs on.

The second one is the other side. A 97 from Decanter also circulates for that same house. It belongs to the Clos Paillot 2017 while we carry the 2018, and it comes from a page paid for by an American importer, where the tasting was not blind. That does not make the wine any less good. It makes that one number something other than it appears at first glance.

What to look for instead

Ask these four questions and you will see through almost any sticker:

1. Is it a medal or a score? A medal is a threshold result from a panel of judges, not a podium. A score is the mark of a single critic or a small panel.
2. Who is it from, and on what scale? A 17 from Jancis Robinson and a 95 on the 100-point scale are both good scores, but you can't put them side by side. Even the same word means something different from one publication to the next: at Wine Spectator "Classic" starts at 95 points, at Wine Enthusiast not until 98.
3. Does it apply to this bottle? A score covers one wine from one year. So check the label to see which cuvée and which year you are holding. A score for the 2016 says nothing about the 2018. And for a non-vintage champagne, a score says little about the batch on the shelf today.
4. Was it blind, and who paid? If a score is marked "sponsored" or "advertorial", it is advertising, not an independent verdict. That doesn't make the wine any worse. It does mean the score is not quite what it seems.

Finally

I don't choose our champagnes by their stickers. I taste with the winemaker, on their own land, and keep asking: which plot, which soil, how much dosage and why. A medal or a score can be a perfectly good reason to try a bottle. It is not a reason to buy it blind.

If you come across a score and you're not sure what it is worth, send me a message at info@selectedbydronk.nl. I'm happy to work it out with you.

Frequently asked questions

Does a gold medal on champagne mean first place?

No. At most wine competitions, gold is a threshold: every wine that scores high enough gets one. At the 2026 Decanter World Wine Awards, that came to 924 wines. Only some trophies, such as "Supreme World Champion" at the Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships, go to the very highest score.

How many wines get a medal?

It varies by competition. In 2026, 27.4 per cent of entries at the Concours Général Agricole received a medal. At the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles it was around 31 per cent in the red and white wine session, and at the Decanter World Wine Awards around 85 per cent.

What does 95 points mean for a champagne?

Usually that a single critic or a small panel gave the wine 95 out of 100 points. It can also come from a competition panel: at the Decanter World Wine Awards, 95 points means gold. How high a score ranks depends on the publication. At Wine Spectator, a 95 falls in the top category, "Classic". At Wine Enthusiast it is "Superb", the second highest.

What is the difference between a medal and a score?

A medal comes from a competition that the producer enters and pays for. A score comes from a critic or a publication. There too the producer sometimes pays: since June 2026 Wine Enthusiast has charged $95 per wine submitted. According to the magazine, this has no influence on the score. A score is usually more transparent, though: you know who gave it, on what scale, and often whether it was tasted blind.

Sources

• Decanter, How we judge wine at the Decanter World Wine Awards, updated June 2026
• Decanter, DWWA 2026 results revealed, 17 June 2026, and Decanter China, DWWA 2026 results, for the total of 16,631 wines
• Decanter, DWWA 2026 entries open, for the entry fee, and How we taste wine at Decanter, 11 January 2024
• Concours Général Agricole, Règlement 2026, art. 27, 30, 38 and 40, and the 2026 infographic
• Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, 2026 entry details, 2025 rules art. 17 and 18, and the 2026 red and white results
• Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships, 2026 medal results, how we judge, why we only award gold and silver medals and how to enter
• Vignerons Indépendants, Concours des Vignerons Indépendants 2026
• Légifrance, Arrêté du 13 février 2013 on the French wine competitions whose medals may appear on the label of wine made in France, art. 1 and 10
• R.T. Hodgson, "An Examination of Judge Reliability at a major U.S. Wine Competition", Journal of Wine Economics 3(2), 2008, pp. 105-113
• R.T. Hodgson, "An Analysis of the Concordance Among 13 U.S. Wine Competitions", Journal of Wine Economics 4(1), 2009, pp. 1-9
• Wine Spectator, scoring scale and Does Wine Spectator publish bad wine scores?, 7 January 2019, and How does Wine Spectator's 100-point scale actually work?, 15 November 2010
• Wine Enthusiast, ratings and the Tasting and Review FAQ, as of 26 June 2026
• Robert Parker Wine Advocate, the rating system and origins of The Wine Advocate; Michelin, Robert Parker retires, 20 May 2019
• Wine-Searcher, Wine scores
• Jancis Robinson, How we score, updated 31 July 2025, and How to score wine, 16 September 2002