Non-Alcoholic Wine Wins the Gold

A non-alcoholic wine--Ariel Free from the J. Lohr Winery of San Jose--has won a gold medal at the Los Angeles County Fair.

Gail Brunton, Agricultural Building secretary, said the beverage was judged by tasters registering their reactions to “blind” or unlabeled potables in the “miscellaneous” category of white table wines. It is a category for wines that do not fall into standard groups, such as sweet white table wine or dry white table wine.

Fair spokesman Sid Robinson called it “a real first.”

No other non-alcoholic wine, he said, has ever won a gold medal at the Pomona fair.

But observers offered a possible explanation:

This year, they said, the judges tasted 1,198 wines in 126 categories, but, as in the past half-dozen years, there was no sweepstakes winner.

The judges just could not seem to agree.