My son Jack, Senior Editor Nick Stock and I are going to remember 2019 for a long time. It was the year that we discovered more than 50 perfect wines among the 25,000 we rated. In fact, we can’t remember a year quite like it; it was truly phenomenal for great wines. It seems that just about every major wine region released great wines onto the market, the majority being from the 2015 and 2016 vintages. These duo vintages will long be remembered much like 1989 and 1990 for Bordeaux. However, 2017 and 2018 should not be forgotten — both produced some exceptional wines, particularly whites.

Many regions shone in quality in our tastings this year. Most notable were Argentina, Bordeaux, Napa Valley, Tuscany, Piedmont, Rioja, Port, Champagne and Chile. That’s why many wines from these regions are included in our list of the Top 100 Wines of 2019. We have 41 100-point wines in the list and another 35 with 99 points. The rest of the wines scored 98 points. All the wines were produced in quantities of 300 cases or more.

 

While the emphasis is on quality, special preference was given to more affordably priced wines. For example, the Top 10 on the list are all priced at less than $80 a bottle. Most of the 100 cost less than $150 a bottle, although a few crept in at the bottom of the list that can cost up to $900 a bottle. It’s a shame that so many of the best-quality wines in the world are incredibly expensive now, but this list includes lots of exceptions to the rule, mainly from Argentina, Australia, and Chile.

Indeed, our list includes what may be one of the greatest wine values on earth, the 98-point El Enemigo Chardonnay Mendoza 2017. It retails for around $25 a bottle! And three of the wines in the Top 10 will only set you back $45-50 a bottle: Muga Rioja Prado Enea Gran Reserva 2011, Marchesi Antinori Umbria Cervaro Della Sala 2017 and Schäfer-Fröhlich Riesling Nahe Felseneck GG 2018.

Quality-price ratio was a key consideration in selecting our Wine of the Year, and this is why we decided on Brunello di Montalcino, the great wine-producing region of Italy’s Tuscany. We tasted close to 200 2015 Brunellos in September and dozens scored 95 points or more. We gave 11 perfect 100-point ratings. The wines will be available in the market in January 2020. Most of the best wines will retail between $50 and $120 a bottle.

• Read more: TOP 100 REPORTS (REGIONAL)
• Read more: 2017 BURGUNDY: A NUANCED, TERROIR-DRIVEN VINTAGE
• Read more: ARGENTINA’S ‘EXTREME WINES’ LEAD THE WAY IN THIS YEAR’S TASTING
• Read more: NAPA 2016 VINTAGE: 5 CONSECUTIVE YEARS OF FANTASTIC WINES 

And the winner is ….

Selecting only one from so many stunning 2015 Brunellos was a tough ask, but in the end we named the Siro Pacenti Brunello di Montalcino Vecchie Vigne 2015 our Wine of the Year 2019. It is a perfect example of what makes 2015 Brunello so compelling to buy and drink. The Siro Pacenti really has a “wow” factor to it, and there’s an energy and excitement to tasting it.

Honestly, it’s a wine that’s just too fantastic not to drink now. We tasted it at least five times over the summer and we liked it more and more. Like all the best 2015 Brunellos, the Pacenti Brunello 2015 shows super intensity of cool and dark fruits as well as stones and flowers and opens to a full and plush body of expansive yet utterly refined tannins that coat your palate in a caressing way. It shows glorious transparency and communication. It’s one of the best young Brunellos I have tasted in my four-decade career and I have been tasting Brunellos professionally since 1983.

Owner Giancarlo Pacenti says his 2015 Brunello is “the wine of his career.” And we have to agree. Check out a short video on what he says about the vintage. There’s also a fun video of the contenders for the Wine of the Year 2019 we posted before publishing this story. 

In total, we included a dozen 2015 Brunellos in our list of the Top 100 Wines of 2019 because of the unprecedented high quality of the wines. Eleven in the list received ratings of 100 points. Check out our report on 2015 Brunellos from September.

The region with the most representation in the list, however, was Bordeaux, with 15 wines included. The high number of chateaux in our list reflects the outstanding quality of the 2016 vintage which followed the superb 2015 vintage — our wine of the year in 2018 was the 2015 Château Canon.

This year, we rated eight wines 100 points in the 2016 Bordeaux tasting report, published earlier this year. As I wrote in that article, the wines have a classicism that reminds me of the great wines of the 1980s, but they have much more precision and clarity due to advances in viticulture and winemaking since then. Moreover, they seem much less manipulated than some Bordeaux from the first decade of this century, when some producers were making more market-driven wines.

The best value out of our top-rated 2016 Bordeaux made it into the top 10 of 2019: Château Larcis-Ducasse. We placed it at No. 7. The St.-Emilion wine sells for less than $100 a bottle and shows beautiful balance and finesse with a complexity in the nose and palate as well as subtle structure. It is an archetypal 2016 Bordeaux. We rated it 99 points.

• Read more: 2015: BRUNELLO’S FAIRY-TALE VINTAGE
• Read more: BORDEAUX 2018: AN EXCEPTIONAL VINTAGE
• Read more: GET READY: THE SUPER ITALIANS ARE COMING

Many regions represented in Top 10 Wines of 2019

The top 10 wines in our list show the diversity of greatness in the wine world today, with entries from Italy, Spain, Germany, France, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina. The top 20 cover much of the same as well as the United States and Australia.

This year, we traveled tens of thousands of miles (Nick traveled the most as he lives in Melbourne) and spent months in tastings, wineries and vineyards. It was tiring but it was great as well. It was really special for me to share some great tastings and visits with my son Jack, who is an accomplished and trusted taster in his own right. We love our jobs and we love great wine. We continue to look for wines that excite us and rate them accordingly. They are wines that have wonderful complexity and personality as well as drinkability and class.

Do we need to taste 25,000 wines in a year? No. But we end up doing so as we keep on traveling and tasting. The exploration never stops, even for a wine writer with 40 years of experience. There is just so much outstanding wine in the world right now. It is a Golden Age for winemaking. We pray it continues despite the current adversities in the world, in particular climate change — a topic we continue to try and cover in detail. However, 2019 was indeed a great year for great wines.

I hope you enjoy our list of the Top 100 Wines of 2019. I hope it inspires you to find a few of the wines and try them. I can’t wait to drink a few of them again!

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