Wine expert Adam Walls runs through the judging process at the Orange Wine Show Judging

The swirling, the sniffing and then the tasting ... bottle after bottle.

Sipping on a glass of good wine, even average wine, and sitting back with a friend and imagining you're in the south of France, dropping terms like 'earthy', 'acidity' and 'balance' or - depending on how much wine you've had - 'viognier' and 'herbaceous', all the while ignoring your regular chaos at home, is one of life's great pleasures.

But, what does it take to really be a wine expert?

"Lots of swirling, lots of sniffing, lots of spitting ... that's an important one," Adam Walls, a wine expert and co-chair of the tasting panel for a company called Wine Selectors said.

Mr Walls was in Orange this week as part of the Orange Wine Show Judging at the Orange Function Centre.

He chaired a panel of about a dozen of the state's best wine judges, on the hunt for the very best the Orange wine region has to offer.

And while it sounds like the best job in the world, sitting back and having a taste of just about every wine one of NSW's most renowned wine regions has to offer, Mr Walls says it's grueling work.

You see, being a wine expert is about much more than just drinking wine.

"You have to think about wine, too," he adds.

"This whole process, it's a marathon, not a sprint. You have to have the ability to concentrate.

"There's a big difference between drinking wine and having to think about wine, and when you've done a full day you surprise yourself at how fatigued you are.

"You're overloading your senses too. You're constantly calling on your ability to sense aromatics, constantly using your sense of taste, and that can overwhelm you pretty quickly."

The wine judging process in Orange this week gave onlookers an insight into that process.

There was 305 different varieties of wine being poured somewhat sparingly into some 3000 glasses over the two days of judging.

Each judge had their own table, with a line of glasses at the top of it in a calculated row. Those glasses sat in numbered squares, too, in what looked like a throwback to an old method of judging. But bringing that adjudicating process into the 21^st century was a near-by iPad, which each judge punched their respective scores into.

Swirling. Sniffing. Spitting (can't forget that one). And then scoring.

That scoring is broken down into varietal, or style classes. When there's enough or where variety is grown widely in the region, they're grouped together.

It essentially means judges are looking at riesling against riesling, sauvignon blanc against sauvignon blanc and chardonnay against chardonnay, and so on and so forth.

At the Orange Wine Show Judging when Mr Walls was stepping us through the process, the judging panel was carefully going through two of those style classes.

There was mainly varieties that hail from bordeaux - cabinet, sauvignon, petit verdot, malbec, and blends of - being looked at by one set of judges.

And over on the other panel, at the same time, other judges were going through a class of mixed, alternate, new wave varieties of wine; think temperino, or gamay, or maybe sangiovese and other Italian varieties.

Judges will individually score each wine and then later come together as a collective to discuss each score.

Once that part of the process is complete, the judging panel chair will weigh in and identify which wines are in line for a 'call back'.

Of the wines that earn a call back, the judges will again look at those, in a completely random order, naturally.

"So you can't chase the wines you liked before ... because there's politics in everything, of course," Mr Walls smiled.

"Then after those call backs, the panel will come up with a consensus, which in my role as chair is to come and green light or nay-say particular wines from being gold medal winning wines."

As mentioned earlier, it's a grueling process. But one an incredibly broad judging panel prides itself on.

Where once wine judges were purely winemakers, such a panel in 2022 looks very different.

At the function centre, there's sommeliers, bar managers, wine writers, a master of wine and those in wine education. The idea behind the plucking of people from every corner of the wine world is to ensure "diverse impression and opinion on each particular wine".

In that wine-sphere, they're called either technical judges or style judges. Style is essentially everything that's not a winemaker, who looks at it from a pure technical point of view.

"Style judges are really there to champion the stuff that the public like to drink," Mr Walls added.

"And the aim of the judging panel as a whole is to promote what the best examples are within that particular class."

And, in the case of the Orange wine region, that promotion isn't a difficult job at all.

Events like the Orange Wine Show Judging continually raises the bar for winemaking in the region.

The judges go through bottles upon bottles of wine to pull out the benchmark of the Orange region, and it's then up to other exhibitors who are making that style of wine to rise to the challenge.

It's a benchmark the wine world is noticing.

Winemakers from across Australia regularly source grapes from Orange to make cool climate varieties.

Orange's sauvignon blanc, pinot grigio, pinot noir and shiraz varieties are particularly sought after.

"The reputation of Orange in the Hunter and greater Newcastle is extraordinarily high, it's fabulous," Mr Walls said.

"I just think Orange, the thing I've noticed in the last five-to-eight years, there's just been this growth of people who are professional in winegrowing and winemaking, and therefore the quality of wine ... it's almost like it's just bloomed.

"The seeds were sown, the hard work has been done, and now it's a really exciting time for this particular region.

"There's a lot of passionate people involved and I think that we've now entered that growth and excitement stage where everyone questions what they do and continued improvement is the real focus and us, as a wine drinkers, we're the beneficiaries of that. So, it's exciting."

So while it's clear not everyone can be a wine expert, be comforted by the fact there's clearly an abundance of them right here in our own backyard.

All we have to do is sit back, swirl, sniff and don't forget to spit.