Top 100 World Wines 2017 and Wine of the Year

This year, we tasted close to 17,000 wines. JamesSuckling.com tasters including myself, Stuart Pigott, Nick Stock and my son Jack tasted wines in just about every major winegrowing country, and most of the tasting was in the given region of production. This gave us an insight into more than the liquid in the bottle. It provided us with an understanding and feel of this year’s releases whether from Tuscany, the Barossa Valley, Rioja, Napa Valley, the Mosel, the Wachau and dozens of other places. We talked to winemakers, walked the vineyards and smelled the land.

It wasn’t done for the frequent flyer miles! We traveled like that in 2017 because we are all curious at JamesSuckling.com what the best wines out there are at the moment — we want to taste and report about them. We love wine, and that’s the bottom line.

After 36 years as a wine critic, this was one of the most exciting. We tasted so many amazing wines and had so many wonderful experiences. And we shared it all as a team, a family and for readers, meaning you. It makes it all the more difficult to create a list of the 100 best wines in 2017. And it’s even harder to come up with the JamesSuckling.com Wine of the Year 2017.

But we decided on one wine in the end: the 100-point Almaviva Puente Alto 2015 from Chile. This is a wine that epitomizes greatness with its intensity, structure and balance. It underlines the movement away from overdone, jammy wines to a neoclassicism with energy and finesse. It also highlights how South America, specifically Chile, has come into its own as a wine area, producing superb wines that can compete with the best in the world. The other two Chilean wines in our top 10 are Seña Valle de Aconcagua 2015 and Clos Apalta Apalta 2014. They are both perfect wines.

The 100-point Almaviva Puente Alto 2015 from Chile

There’s also an Argentine wine in the group: Catena Zapata Chardonnay Mendoza Adrianna Vineyards White Stones 2014. Among the top 10 in the list are also a consistently great merlot from Tuscany, Petrolo Toscana Galatrona 2015; a super cab from Australia’s Margaret River, Vasse Felix Cabernet Sauvignon Margaret River Tom Cullity 2013; a spicy riesling from Austria’s Wachau, F.X. Pichler Riesling Wachau Ried Kellerberg Smaragd 2016; a crazy quality pinot noir from California’s Sonoma Coast, Littorai Pinot Noir Sonoma County Sonoma Valley Sonoma Coast The Haven Vineyard 2015; an amazing Super Tuscan, Fattoria Le Pupille Maremma Toscana Saffredi 2015; and a great Bordeaux, Ducru-Beaucaillou 2014.