You would expect Napa Valley to dominate our list of the Top 100 USA Wines in 2019. We rated more than 3,000 American wines this year and about 2,000 were from California. Most of those were from the Napa Valley. However we also tasted many wines from Oregon, Washington, Virginia and a number of other states.

Big names and big prices tend to garner the highest ratings so they are at the top of our list. I tried to push the least expensive 100-point wine – Continuum Napa Valley Sage Mountain Vineyard 2016 – to the top of the list. This wine is a relative bargain at about $225 a bottle compared to the other perfect wines in the list, which begin at about $500 a bottle and go up to more than $3,000. Don’t shoot the messenger on this. Napa Valley makes some amazing quality wines but most of them are incredibly expensive.

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California still best

About 60 percent of the list is from Napa Valley, so if you are looking for better value I suggest you seek out the Oregon wines. Sonoma is another option. We tasted just overs 400 wines from Oregon and the consistency in quality is terrific. The state’s key wine regions have had a string of outstanding quality harvests and this is reflected in the beautiful and clean fruit and fine texture in the wines, mostly pinot and chardonnay as you would expect. Sonoma is the same in many ways and pinot noir is fantastic as always, especially from the coastal regions.

Washington had slightly higher rated wines in the list than Oregon, with producers such as Cayuse Vineyards, Leonetti Cellar, and K Vintners leading the pack. These are fruit-driven wines that also show a freshness and balance – a hallmark of all the top wines of the state. They consistently make the best wines in Washington.

We wish we could have put more wines from other states such as Virginia, Texas or Arizona into the Top 100 list, but they just haven’t reached comparable levels of quality to the West Coast states. We will continue to monitor their progress in the future. That said, we were happy to include the solid Bordeaux blend from RdV Vineyards: RdV Vineyards Middleburg Rendezvous 2016. This is always an awesome red and shows such resilience and energy.

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Noteworthy inclusions

One of my favorite wines in the list is the Eisele Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc Napa Valley 2017. This is one of America’s greatest white wines now and isn’t even a chardonnay! The low yield barrel fermented and aged sauvignon blanc shows the depth, intensity and balance of great dry whites from Bordeaux such as Château Haut-Brion or Domaine de Chevalier. The owners of Château Latour have taken the wines of Eisele to a new level after they purchased it in 2013. It was formerly called Araujo Estate.

Also noteworthy is the Antica Terra Pinot Noir Eola-Amity Hills Antikythera 2016. Maggie Harrison is making some of the most soulful and best handcrafted reds in the United States. I love her pinots’ subtle and complex aromas and fine textured and well-fruited palates.

I hope you find some old favorites and new gems here. All the wines were first ranked by score and then relative price in their respective points brackets.

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– James Suckling, CEO & editor

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