Many wine consumers in the world may have the perception that New Zealand is a monolithic wine-producing country focused on off-dry sauvignon blanc. But they need to understand how diverse and different the world of wine is on this island nation.

James just returned to Hong Kong from a tasting trip in New Zealand, where he found a surfeit of excellent varietal wines – and not just from pinot noir or chardonnay.

The JamesSuckling.com tasting team tapped into 506 wines over the past week, headed by Senior Editor Stuart Pigott, who was hot on the wine trail close to his home in the hills above Frankfurt, Germany.

Our latest Monthly Tasting Report spans 3,600 wines and 19 countries, but it was Austria that delivered many of our top scorers in September.

Our latest Weekly Tasting Report takes us far and wide across the globe, with check-ins from the Rheingau, Oregon, Paso Robles and Australia.

This week’s tasting report covers 639 wines from 12 countries, with Senior Editor Stuart Pigott and Associate Editor Claire Nesbitt digging deeper into their Austrian motherlode and James continuing to taste widely across the Italian spectrum.

Germany, Spain, Italy and Australia were front and center on our tasting trail in August as we rated nearly 2,700 wines from the four countries out of the 3,199 bottles in total we tapped into during the month. It was also one of our biggest months ever for 100-point wines, as we uncovered an even 10 perfect scorers.

It was a week of tasting perfection at JamesSuckling.com, with seven of the wines we rated – four from Spain and three from Germany – achieving 100-point scores.

Dr. Burklin-Wolf, a legendary producer in the Pfalz region of Germany, landed a coup in the 2022 vintage.