People's Choice Wine Competition: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the People's Choice Wine Competition is and who runs it

The People's Choice Wine Competition is the public tasting vote staged at the annual conference of ND Grape & Wine, formally the North Dakota Grape and Wine Association. The association was established in 2006 and invites grape growers, winemakers, enthusiasts and the public to its conference, annual meeting and wine competition. The People's Choice tasting is the Friday evening highlight of that gathering, where attendees sample and celebrate wines made with cold climate grapes.

The programme runs on the association's own site, not on an outside voting platform. The current competition page sits at ndgwa.org/2026, and it carries both the competition information and the published results. That makes the organizer and the host the same entity, which is unusual among North Dakota public votes: most statewide and city ballots in the state are run by media publishers or community-vote networks, while this one answers to a grower and winemaker association.

Vertically it is a best-of award, decided by a public-vote mechanic, but the electorate is defined by the room: the people who attend the conference and taste the wines. The association's mailing address is P.O. Box 6050, Dept. 7670, Fargo, ND 58108-6050, and its site also carries membership, bylaws, industry resources and past events such as pruning workshops and summer tours.

The dated record for the NDGWA wine competition

Every cycle from 2023 through 2026 is a confirmed edition of the People's Choice Wine Competition, each anchored to the association's annual conference cycle. The 2026 page publishes the outcome in full: there were 49 wine entries, and the category breakdown was 15 red, 11 white, 17 non-grape and fruit, and 6 sweet and dessert. The cider and mead categories drew no entries that year, so ciders donated by individuals and meads donated by Prairie Rose Meadery were available to taste instead.

The entry side of the cycle is dated: entries are due at the Nome Schoolhouse by 3:00 p.m. on Friday, October 30th, per the association's entry page. The results phase of the 2026 cycle falls between June and August, which is when the conference, the tasting and the published outcome land. What the association has not printed anywhere is the exact open and close of the People's Choice tasting window itself; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Because the competition is tied to a conference rather than to a standalone online ballot, the calendar a supporter needs has two anchors: the autumn entry deadline for winemakers, and the conference season in which the tasting and results appear. Both are published by NDGWA on its own pages ahead of each cycle, and the 2026 results page is the reference point for how a finished cycle looks.

How a supporter votes at the People's Choice tasting

The mechanic is a tasting ballot, not a click. Attendees at the conference Friday evening session sample the entered wines, and as in past years they select their top three wines in each category in no particular order. There is no ranking within the three picks and no online voting step described on the competition pages; the vote is cast by the people in the room, on the materials handed out at the tasting.

That shapes who counts as a voter. Unlike a readers-choice ballot where anyone with a browser can participate, this electorate is the conference audience: growers, winemakers, enthusiasts and members of the public who bought into the event. A winery's support therefore comes from being poured, being tasted and being remembered well enough to make someone's top three, not from a link shared online.

The published outcome confirms the shape of the vote. The 2026 results page names the entry counts per category and the People's Choice outcome, and it notes that the top-three rule was applied as in past years. Donated ciders and meads were poured for tasting even though those categories had no entries, so tasters still worked through the full range of styles on the night.

For the next cycle, the practical sequence is the same: enter or attend, taste, mark three picks per category, and look for the results on the association's competition page once the conference closes.

How this ballot sits beside North Dakota's other public votes

North Dakota's public-vote landscape splits into two kinds of ballot. The first kind is the city readers-choice contest, run by publishers and vote networks: CommunityVotes Fargo, CommunityVotes Bismarck, CommunityVotes Grand Forks and CommunityVotes Minot each cover their own market, while the Bismarck Tribune Best of the Best is a newspaper programme and Best of the Best - Best of the Midwest spans a regional field.

The People's Choice Wine Competition is the other kind. It is run by a trade association rather than a publisher, it covers the whole state through one annual conference, and it is decided in a tasting room by attendees rather than through an open online ballot. Its subject is narrow, the wines entered that year, and its electorate is self-selecting in a way city contests are not.

For a winery or a wine enthusiast, that difference matters when choosing where to invest effort. A readers-choice ballot rewards months of online reminders across many categories; the NDGWA vote rewards presence at the conference, a well-poured flight and a memorable tasting. The two kinds of ballot do not compete for the same vote, and a supporter of one is not automatically a participant in the other.

Building support for a wine entry at the NDGWA conference

Support in this programme is built before the tasting, because the voters are the attendees and the ballot is a top-three pick made in the room. The association's own rules set the path: entries are due at the Nome Schoolhouse by 3:00 p.m. on the October deadline, and once a wine is poured, every taster who tries it can place it among their top three in its category. A winemaker's realistic levers are entering early, being present at the conference to talk about the wine, and making the story behind a cold-climate grape easy to remember in a long tasting flight.

The organizer's structure leaves no online voting channel, so tactics built for web ballots do not transfer here. If you are comparing this vote with online contests where supporters vote repeatedly, our votes guide explains how those ballots differ from an in-person tasting, and our legality overview covers the rules questions that come up around public votes generally. For this competition, the honest summary is that the organizer counts attendee ballots only, and the tasting room is the whole electorate.