When I first moved to Australia, I kept hearing the name come up: Len Evans. Passed around in hushed excitement, the name arose again and again. Other words surrounded the name: Tutorial. Scholar. And some of the most heralded wineries of the world were said in the same breath. My curiosity piqued: who was this Len Evans, and what was his cherished tutorial?

Len was a true renaissance man: working as a duck farmer, golf instructor, auto muffler producer, and script writer before finding his love for wine. He then became one of Australia’s most prominent restaurateurs, retailers, commentators, writers, and vignerons. He had his hand in nearly every aspect of the wine trade. He was larger than life, the ultimate host, and mentor to many of the current leaders of Australia’s wine industry.⠀

Len’s “Theory of Capacity” was infamous, detailing how many bottles one had left to drink in their lifetime, and how to not squander such opportunity. “You’ve got to make the most of the time you’ve got left. You’ve got to calculate your future capacity. A bottle of wine a day is 365 bottles a year…People who say you can’t drink good stuff all the time are fools. You must drink good stuff all the time. Every bottle of inferior wine you drink is like smashing a superior bottle against a wall: the pleasure is lost forever. You can’t get that bottle back.”

When Len was in his 70s, with some extra time on his hands, he came up with the idea of starting a tutorial. “The idea was to seek out, each year, twelve gifted palates who could further be trained as show judges.”

Show judging is serious business in Australia. There are dozens of different shows across the country each year, with tens of thousands of wines submitted. I won’t do a few run-down of the system here, but Huon Hooke wrote a great article for the Real Review in 2018 that details the how the wine-show system works, for those curious. But bottom line: it is an important part of wine culture in Australia.

So the Len Evans Tutorial was born. Each year, hundreds of candidates apply to have a seat at the tutorial: a week-long wine-tasting crash course. The pool of applicants includes winemakers, sommeliers, retailers, distributors and importers, educators, and wine writers—basically anyone in the trade, as well as the infrequent enthusiast who wants to try their hand at show judging.

A mix of fun and grueling is what past attendees call the tutorial. Hundreds of wines are tasted in various brackets and flights across four and a half days. But these aren’t wines you come across every day. The list of wines tasted across previous seminars is a literal who’s-who of the greatest wines in Australia and in the world: Best’s, Bindi, Bonneau du Martray, Brokenwood, Clape, Clonakilla, Coche Dury, Cullen, de Vogüé, d’Yquem, Egon Müller, Giaconda, Grosset, Guigal, Haut-Brion, Jamet, Keller, Krug, Lafite Rothschild, Leflaive, Leroy, Margaux, Mount Mary, Mouton Rothschild, Palmer, Penfolds, Philipponnat, Ponsot, PYCM, Raveneau, Rousseau, Salon, Sassicaia, Seppeltsfield, Taylor Fladgate, Trimbach, Tyrrell’s, Wendouree…the list goes on and on. And every year, the tutorial finishes with a Domaine de la Romanée Conti flight (donated by the domaine itself), specifically comparing the various grand crus that the infamous producer makes in a single vintage. Scholars are asked to determine which vineyard is which, and what vintage is being presented.

Each year, a “Dux” is crowned – the person who performed the best across the week. The wines are served blind, but the main goal isn’t to be able to nail what each wine is. The goal is to be able to assess them aptly in the context of how one might approach a wine in a wine show. How many points would this wine receive, and why? The Dux receives a round-trip ticket to Europe (business class!), to continue their studies of the great wines of the world, with a guaranteed visited to DRC.

Samantha Connew, veteran Aussie winemaker and owner of Coal River Valley’s Stargazer Wine, said this of her time at the Tutorial, in its second season: “From my perspective, the Tutorial was one of the most intimidating, inspiring, challenging, collegiate, educative weeks of my life. To be surrounded by people whose only goal was to either educate or be educated about the great wines of the world with the intention of both creating future wine judges but more importantly future great palates fed directly into my own philosophy of ‘paying it forward’ as a legacy. And part of that is being on the other side of it and being involved as an infrequent tutor and also behind the scenes of contributing to making it all happen.”

Kavita Faiella, who was a tutorial scholar in 2017, said of the week: “It was certainly the greatest wine week of my life. What I enjoyed tasting most was actually the very old Australian wines, as these are even more rare than iconic European wines, given that Australia doesn’t have a very good record for cellaring much at all, they are few and far between and so so good when you get to see one.”

This year was supposed to be the 20^th year of the Len Evans Tutorial, and was the first time the tutorial was cancelled since its inception, due to COVID-19. But the industry is excited to celebrate the tutorial’s 20^th year in 2021 and looking forward to a long and prosperous continuation of the tradition. This phenomenal program has benefited the Australian wine industry for the past 20 years, creating wine professionals who not only know the ins and outs of the Australian show judging system, but truly understand the benchmark wines of the world, and are invested in scholarship and bettering the community.