Wine competitions can vary widely in their characteristics, and are sometimes geared toward a specific audience (i.e., consumers vs. industry professionals).
In most competitions, medals are given to individual wines in various categories on the basis of the blind tasting.
Medal rankings are different from the 100 point scales that are used by many journalistic publications, such as Wine Spectator.
There are critics who argue that the results of such competitions may be misleading and should not be relied upon as a measure of quality.
There is generally an entry fee for winemakers to enter their wines into the competition.