The East Coast Wines That Won Double Gold in the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition
Who earned bragging rights?
Walk into many winery tasting rooms on the East Coast (and elsewhere), and you will probably see shelves with bottles draped with medals, usually of the gold, silver, and bronze variety. Those medals reflect the scores that judges awarded the wines in competition.
Sometimes, those medals are from the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, the largest competition of American wines in the country. While many wineries use any medal they get as a bragging right, which they certainly can if they want to, I’m always most interested in finding out which wines won double gold (when all judges agree the wine is a gold, it’s bumped up to double gold). It’s an imperfect system for sure, but when I see high-scoring medals from the SFCWC, it helps to put wines and wineries on my radar, sometimes ones I’ve never heard of before.
A while back, I interviewed the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Craig LaBan for my wine column about judging the competition. He gave me his thoughts on the highest-scoring wines. .
“Golds and double golds help in the tasting rooms in one aspect,” said LaBan. “Wineries can say, ‘Look – we were judged as excellent among peers from all across the country, even California.’”
The competition puts wines into categories with their peers throughout the country in grape, style, and price.
Double-Gold Medal East Coast Winners
God bless the spreadsheet. I copied all the winning info from the list and pasted it into a spreadsheet, then sorted by state, and finally by medals to find the double gold winners I was looking for.
Sugarloaf Mountain Vineyard, MD, 2022 Cabernet Franc Reserve, Maryland
Auburn Road Vineyards, NJ, 2023 Pinot Grigio, Outer Coastal Plain AVA
Bellview Winery, NJ, 2022 Chardonnay, Outer Coastal Plain AVA
Billsboro Winery, NY, 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, Finger Lakes AVA
Weis Vineyards, NY, 2023 Unoaked Chardonnay, Finger Lakes AVA
Stone Farm Cellars & Vineyard, PA, 2023 Dry Riesling, American
Barrel Oak Winery, VA, 2023 Dry Rose, Fauquier County AVA
Eastwood Farm and Winery, VA, 2022 Cabernet Franc, Virginia
Eastwood Farm and Winery, VA, 2022 Petit Verdot, Virginia
Endhardt Vineyards, VA, 2023 Sauvignon Blanc - Upper Block, Loudoun County AVA
Fifty-Third Winery and Vineyard, VA, 2021 Rock Ridge Red Blend (Petit Verdot leading), Virginia
Greenhill Vineyards, VA, 2022 Eternity (Cabernet Franc), Virginia
Ingleside Vineyards, VA, NV October Harvest (Late Harvest), Northern Neck George Washington Birthplace AVA
Can we say these are the best wines on the East Coast? No. Wineries voluntarily submit wines to the competition. For a variety of reasons, many wineries don’t submit any wines. Countless excellent wines from throughout the country don’t end up in the SFCWC. For me, as I mentioned above, I use the high scores to help me discover new wines or wineries to seek out. You can interpret the results as you wish, and use them however they suit you.