With the Commercial and Home Wine Competitions now just fading memories, the 2018 OC Fair is fast approaching, and the OCWS is geared up to run our most important fundraising effort of the year—The Courtyard at the OC Fair. This year’s Fair theme is “Free Your Inner Farmer,” and the Fair runs Wednesdays through Sundays, beginning on Friday, July 13 and concluding on Sunday, August 12. The Fair was attended by over 1,400,000 people last year, so The Courtyard clearly provides us with a perfect venue for reaching lots of people with our mission of wine education.

In exchange for running the OC Fair’s wine competitions, the Orange County Fair and Events Center affords us the opportunity to run The Courtyard and realize the income therefrom. In addition to the income received from The Courtyard funding the wine competitions, it also provides funds for our year round overhead and, by way of donations, for our Scholarship Program. So, it is of utmost importance to the organization that The Courtyard be a huge success! It takes over 300 OCWS volunteers to man The Courtyard during the Fair. Whether you are a new volunteer or a seasoned veteran at The Courtyard, this is your opportunity to support the fundraising efforts of the Orange County Wine Society.

In addition to hosting The Courtyard during the OC Fair, some of the most knowledgeable and experienced OCWS members will be conducting wine seminars on Saturdays and Sundays. Check out the seminar schedule on the OCWS website and come learn something new about wines and wine pairings that you may not know you don’t already know.

So, if you seek fun, don’t miss coming out and freeing your inner farmer with wine fun at the Fair! I look forward to seeing you there.

– Fran Gitsham, President

Last month I wrote that we are in a very important partnership with the Orange County Fair & Events Center (OCFEC) which affords the OCWS the opportunity to run their wine competitions each year. What I didn’t touch on was the behind the scenes workings that make a competition a reality. Unless you’ve volunteered for these amazing, professionally run and labor intensive events, I assure you, it is mindboggling what it takes to run successful competitions. And, the fact that everything is done by volunteers is truly unbelievable!

About the time you read this, the 2018 Commercial Wine Competition will be taking place or has concluded. The Competition, traditionally held the first weekend of June each year, isn’t “technically” completed until the last bottles are sorted and the award medals are mailed toward the end of June. Planning actually begins barely two months after the prior competition has completed. The hotel contract for 2019 was negotiated at least two years ago. The first of a number of communications to over 4,000 wineries will be sent in September in preparation for the 2019 Competition. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Commercial Competition Committee is comprised of a number of people from the Chairperson, who heads (actually this could be herds, too) the rest of the committee for the year to the Head and Assistant Head of Judges, who contact and coordinate nearly 90 professional winemakers and winery principals to judge the Competition, to the tech coordinator, who oversees the software programs and equipment, to the hotel coordinator, who handles the rooms and meals, invitations, etc., to the volunteer coordinators, who schedule and direct over 300 volunteers in two days, to the coordinator of scoring and verification, and so on and so on. Impressed yet? No, just keep reading.

How about the most vital role as Head of Cataloging who oversee 2,700 wine entries? No, that is not 2,700 bottles, that is 16,200 bottles, as each entry consists of six bottles. Then take into consideration the bagging coordinators as the Competition is a blind tasting; one bottle of each entry has to be bagged and labeled for pouring at the Competition. Let’s think about not only transporting the wines to the hotel, but the glasses, racks, trays and towels, too. Also take into consideration that everything that is done has to be undone in closing for this year’s Competition – then prepare for next year. No sooner does the Competition itself end, a Steering Committee of six compiles all the information and confirms the awarding of medals. This is followed by each and every entry being photographed for publication on our results website (www.WineCompetition.com) and mailing notifications to the award winning wineries, followed by the medals.

This is just a brief glance into the Commercial Wine Competition. On a smaller scale, the Home Wine Competition is run with basically the same dynamics and is held on the Fairgrounds the weekend following the Commercial Wine Competition and receives over 650 entries a year.

Have I provided you with enough information yet to have your head spinning? I could continue to bore you with more statistics, positions and a list of the names of people who, out of their passion for this organization and goodness of their hearts, take these lead positions. Rest assured, this is just the tip of the iceberg wherein you hear about volunteers running this organization. I will close with exactly what I wrote last month, as I cannot possibly say it any better a month later.

All of this is accomplished at the hands of hundreds of dedicated volunteers without whom this organization would not be what it is today. Truly amazing in my opinion! I am so proud to be your President this year and have the opportunity to share stories of incredible people and events with all of you.

– Fran Gitsham, President

The Orange County Wine Society is known for running The Courtyard at the OC Fair each year and reaping the benefits, but most people don’t know how this came to be. Proceeds from The Courtyard, along with the Wine Auction each year, pay for running the Competitions and sustaining the organization; however, this does not come from the OCWS alone. The OCWS is in a very important partnership with the Orange County Fair and Events Center (OCFEC) which affords us the opportunity to continue running the Competitions and realizing the benefits.

The Commercial and Home Wine Competitions that we run each year are, in fact, owned by the OCFEC, not the OCWS. However, it was that small group of home winemakers that I wrote about just a few months ago in The Wine Press that not only began the organization 42 years ago, but also approached the OC Fair with the thought of running wine competitions at the OC Fair. Hence, with a single table and a handful of wines, the OC Fair wine competitions were born.

From that handful of passionate people and one small table, the OCWS now runs one of the most prestigious commercial wine competitions in the country. The OC Fair Commercial Wine Competition, which is held offsite over an entire weekend, finds entries of upwards of 2,500+ California commercial wines each year that are judged by a distinguished panel of nearly 90 judges comprised of mostly renowned California winemakers and winery principals. The Competition, which is traditionally held on the first weekend of June each year, finds over 300 OCWS volunteers working hard to make each competition more successful than the one before. The Winemakers’ Group of the OCWS, which is comprised of about 80 die-hard home winemakers, many of whom are award-winning winemakers in their own right, and a couple of hundred more supporters, run the OC Fair Home Wine Competition on the second weekend of June each year. This Home Wine Competition, which is held on the Fairgrounds, finds approximately 220 volunteers to make this event a success. Over 100 of these individuals are trained home wine judges who judge approximately 650 entered wines that are served by about 80 stewards. Behind the scenes finds scorers and glass washers, among many other supporting roles, as well as both breakfast and lunch created and served by the OCWS Cooks’ Caucus.

All of this culminates in The Courtyard during the OC Fair, where the OCWS has the pleasure of serving tastes of that year’s award winning commercial wines throughout the 23 days of the Fair, pouring glasses of other commercial wines and hosting a number of wine seminars in an effort to continue our organization’s mission of wine education. All of this is accomplished at the hands of hundreds of dedicated volunteers without whom this organization would not be what it is today. Truly amazing in my opinion!  I am so proud to be your President this year and have the opportunity to share stories of incredible people and events with all of you.

For more information about the Competitions and The Courtyard, please visit.

– Fran Gitsham, President

I’m going to open this article with the closing paragraph and, after reading it, if you choose to read through to the end, you’ll hopefully have a better understanding as to what it takes to run this organization. The OCWS is a volunteer, non-profit educational corporation. Although volunteering is not a requirement of membership, it is most certainly encouraged to help make us a success. I ask all of you to please take a look at the 2017-2018 Director Responsibility list posted in this edition of The Wine Press and consider becoming a part in running an event this coming year. Unfortunately, over a period of time, the Board has assumed the responsibility of not only running the affairs of the organization with just a small handful of other dedicated member volunteers, but also run most of the events as well. The end. Now, I would greatly appreciate you continuing to read from what was to be the beginning of this article.

As I suspect you all know, the business of the OCWS is overseen by a Board of Directors made up of nine OCWS members who are die-hard volunteers. The only paid positions within the organization are those of the office staff, bookkeeper and Website Administrator, which are all hourly paid, part-time positions. Although the nine Directors each put in thousands of hours a year to run the engine, it’s the unsung and often unrecognized heroes of the organization that are the other hundreds of members who choose to volunteer and help run events throughout the year for whatever reason. Be it for the camaraderie, the feeling of knowing that they’re a part of something bigger than themselves or, maybe, just for the love of wine leftovers, these 400 or so volunteers are the ones to be thanked for running the entire vehicle when needed.

Take, for example, our biggest fundraiser of the year, The Courtyard at the OC Fair. In addition to a core committee group of roughly 20 people, we had 322 volunteers overall that worked any number of positions before, throughout and after the 2017 OC Fair that made The Courtyard a raging success. The OCWS is afforded the opportunity to run The Courtyard and realize the profits in order to run the Commercial Wine and Homewine Competitions on behalf of the Orange County Fair and Events Center. Now, take into consideration that preparation for the competitions, both held in the beginning of June each year and both requiring as much help to run as The Courtyard, begins almost as soon as the prior year’s competitions are complete. All run by volunteers!

Now, add into the equation our own cooking group, the Cook’s Caucus, who cater three OCWS events a year, the many pursuits of the Winemakers’ Group, the Marketing Committee, the wine sort, the wine auction, mini-tastings, monthly winery programs, Dine with Wine, the annual Spring and Fall membership events, etc., etc.  All run by volunteers!

We are an organization of almost 1,000 members, with approximately 40% of members volunteering. I’ve personally been approached more times than I care to recall with critiques of programs and events. Knowing there are lots of great ideas floating around in an organization with highly intelligent and motivated people, I would love to see those of you with new creative ideas, and the energy to help incorporate them step up to help keep the OCWS fun, informative and appealing. Your Board of Directors is here to encourage and support all efforts and is just waiting to hear from you. Please consider taking all those thoughts and ideas you’ve had and kept to yourself and put them into action.

I truly hope to hear from you. Thank you.

– Fran Gitsham, President