You won’t be surprised to see so many California wines in this year’s Top 100 Wines of the USA, but you might be slightly shocked to see so many pinot noirs and chardonnays, including our Wine of the Year for the USA, the Hirsch Vineyards Pinot Noir Sonoma County Sonoma Coast Raschen Ridge 2021.

Our ratings in November included a relative bonanza of perfect-scoring bottles – five from California and one from Germany – as we tasted more than 1,800 wines from 17 countries.

California continues to impress in this week’s tasting report with so many outstanding quality 2021s, both red and white, as well as a few special 2020s, such as the pinot noirs of Calera.

It's not often James gives four wines perfect scores of 100 points and rates another dozen 99 points during a mere two-week tasting trip, but Napa's 2021 vintage proved that such exceptionalism is possible.

Great Wines World Miami 2024 is the largest event ever in our global wine-tasting series, bringing together 350 producers from just about everywhere along with thousands of wine lovers and trade. It's the one huge event on our global calendar you won't want to miss.

2021 produced some outstanding wines in both Sonoma County and Napa, but what made the vintage so great? James was in Northern California to find out.

Senior Editor Stuart Pigott was in the Mosel over the past week for a final round of visits for his just-published Germany Annual Report, and what a lineup it was, with the legendary Egon Müller-Scharzhof and Joh. Jos. Prom estates heading the bill.

Although our October tastings of 2,017 wines didn’t uncover any perfect-scoring bottles, they did give us the chance to wax lyrical about Germany’s 2022 vintage, which gave us six of our top-rated wines during the month.

Out of the nearly 39,000 wines the JamesSuckling.com tasting team rated over the past year, there could only be a single No. 1, but what an incredible bottle it is.