The ten Finest Wines We Tasted This 12 months
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If tasting wine and writing about it sounds like a great job, believe us, it really is, and we have no complaints. Week after week we get to enjoy some of the finest wines in the world, but please remember, we’re doing it all for you. In a normal day we’re tasting through around 20 wines, adding up to 120 a week and somewhere north of 6,000 per year from more than 30 countries and 200-plus regions around the world. And we’re also trying wine whenever we’re out to dinner or meeting with friends, pushing that total even higher. So it was really hard to narrow our choices down to just 10, but we’ve gone through our notes and have come up with a list that represents bottles that we didn’t just sip, spit, and take notes on but bottles we truly enjoyed.
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Vérité 2012 Le Desir
Helene Seillan, whose father, Pierre, made this wine, was literally the last person we had dinner with before the world shut down for Covid in 2020. We had planned dinner in a restaurant but decided it was best to limit exposure and eat at home. We visited Helene and her family in Sonoma in the early part of this year as they opened the new Vérité winery and tasting room to the public, and it was a heartfelt reunion. We enjoyed lunch and several back vintages of their wine on an unusually cold, rainy day, and this Cabernet Franc-based wine from a great vintage really ticked off all the boxes. Not that it’s old at all, but there was no evidence of bottle age whatsoever in its gorgeous butterscotch, dark chocolate, and cassis flavors.
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Champagne Bollinger R.D. 2008
This “recently disgorged” Champagne was served at a lunch in Paris featuring the same vintage from a regular sized bottle alongside the same wine from magnum and double magnum, which is a total baller move. Disgorged in October 2022, it has incredible complexity and freshness.
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Liber Pater 2007
We get to go to some pretty cool events, but at this year’s Golden Vines Awards Dinner and Gala at the Opera Garnier in Paris, the organizers pulled out all the stops. The all-star lineup of wine included the 2007 from Liber Pater, which is touted as the world’s most expensive wine. We weren’t sure we were going to like it, because, just read that last line again, but one sip alongside chef Alain Ducasse’s beef with cocoa and we understood what the fuss was all about.
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Torres Mas de la Rosa 2017
Wine writers often suffer from what we call the “palazzo effect,” which is when you mentally increase how good a wine is because you’re sitting on the terrace of some Italian count’s palazzo drinking his wine. We’ve rolled this one around in our heads, and it definitely did not get elevated because of that other ailment, the “vineyard effect.” However, drinking this luscious blend of Garnacha and Cariñena at the base of a towering amphitheater-shaped vineyard in Priorat last winter was just mind blowing, knowing how much care and effort had gone preserving 80-year-old vines and making amazing wine from them.
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Veuve Clicquot 2015 La Grande Dame
The cork on this one was popped for one of our weekly home tastings, and there was no way we were passing the remainder of this bottle on to a neighbor, as we often do. Made with 90 percent Pinot Noir, the latest vintage of La Grande Dame was perfect with the salmon, cream cheese, and bagels that we hastily purchased to turn our random Tuesday into a special occasion.
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Valduero Lantigua 1989
Only 500 bottles of this were made and Valduero proprietor and winemaker Yolanda Garcia Viadero pulled one out for us. This totally under-the-radar Ribera del Duero Tempranillo spent four years in barrel and waited in the bottle for almost 30 years for us to enjoy its combination of fresh-, dried-, and cooked-fruit flavors brimming with unbelievable freshness and acidity.
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Ornellaia 2013 Bolgheri Superiore
Sometimes at tastings or lunches we don’t finish a single glass, and other times we drain one quickly and ask for more. At an early spring tasting featuring Ornellaia from five different decades, with vintages from 1988 through 2020, the standout pour for both of us was 2013. Where other bottlings showcased power, the accent here was on austerity and finesse. Winemaker Axel Heinz pointed out that this was a difficult vintage, which just goes to show that sometimes adversity brings out the best.
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Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Echezeaux 2020
This horizontal tasting was a wine lover’s dream. We often find ourselves at vertical or “library” tastings, but like many Burgundy producers, DRC makes 12 different wines, so they showed the incredible 2020 vintage to a handful of journalists. This was a hard call; initially Jeff liked the Richebourg and Mike liked the La Tâche, but after multiple tastings and re-visits we both loved the Echezaux for its elegance and finesse.
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W & J Graham’s 1977 Vintage Port
From a year that’s considered “legendary” in Port history, this was enjoyed as part of a tasting celebrating Graham’s 200th vintage; the family were considered latecomers to the Port trade when they bought their first estate in 1820. Although some of its dark berry flavors have faded, good acidity and strong flavors of chocolate, almond, and hazelnut highlight the beauty of drinking well-aged Port.
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Trimbach 2008 Riesling Clos Ste. Hune
We pulled this gorgeous grand cru, single vineyard Riesling out of the back of our wine fridge and brought it to one of our frequent BYOB Chinatown lunches with friends, where it proceeded to steal the show. Putting proof to the claim that Riesling can age, it had luscious citrus fruit flavors, amazing minerality, and a vein of acidity that was perfect to pair with our pork dumplings, shrimp shumai, and tender roast pork.
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Source: Robb Report
