The racket of third party endorsements - gold medals to influence the gullible

There's a nice little racket going on in the wine industry these days. It's called giving quality endorsements for money.
Let me explain. Those wonderfully pretty gold medal stamps you see on wine labels and in advertisements from retailers: most of them are near enough to worthless as a guide to quality.

The game is played this way. Establish a wine show and charge producers an entry fee. Make sure that everybody wins a prize. Hey presto and yours will be a show that wine companies want to enter. Lots of wonderful revenue for organisers and attractive stamps to mislead consumers into thinking the products displaying them must be worthy.
This a con trick being performed on a massive scale with drinkers being the ones conned.
Now of course there are some legitimate shows but even medals from them are worth being sceptical about. Just look at the different judgements delivered by the various shows around Australia. A gold in one place can be a mere bronze or unrewarded somewhere else.