Wine & Spirits - February 2018 - 38

Our Recommendations
Wine & Spirits recommendations start with a panel of our peers. We present all wines to screening panels composed of retailers, sommeliers
and other wine-buying professionals. We present flights of like wines in numbered glasses, revealing only vintage, appellation and variety-and price, if
the wine is $15 or less. We then ask our panelists if they would recommend the wine, and why. Our goal is to draw on a broad universe of tasters to help us
decide which wines are worth recommending, and to avoid the prejudices any one critic might exercise, consciously or not, against certain styles or types.
Our screening panels, run by a W&S editor, recommend, on average, 20 to 30 percent of the wines we taste. We then present all
recommended wines to the editor charged with reviewing that region's wines to rate them. Our goal with these ratings is for each of our
reviewers to provide a consistent point of view against which you may measure your own taste over time.
In the pages that follow, we present all the wines our editors have scored 90 points or better, as well as all the Best Buys-wines we have recommended that cost less than the median price for their respective categories. Subscribers can access our online database, including all wines tasted
and reviews of all recommended wines.

FEBRUARY 2018 TASTINGS
YEAR'S BEST
US SYRAH & GRENACHE, P. 40
NORTHERN RHÔNE, P. 43
MOSEL RIESLING, P. 54
FINGER LAKES, P. 60
WEST COAST RIESLING, P. 62
PORTUGUESE WINE, P. 65

FOCUS
AUSTRALIA, P. 48
SOUTH AFRICA, P. 63

TASTED

RECOMMENDED

TOP WINES

BEST BUYS

376
168
224
328
145
299

98
77
96
74
34
83

45
47
59
29
14
40

9
22
34
15
6
29

188
194

89
34

59
19

27
11

428
335

107
134

52
65

16
51

2,685

826

429

220

NEW RELEASES
NORTH AMERICAN WINES, P. 76
IMPORTED WINES, P. 81

TOTAL WINES
The Top Wine and Best Buy numbers are a subset of the
total number of recommended wines.

SOME MEMBERS OF OUR TASTING PANELS FOR THIS ISSUE
SF: Peter Steiner, Sens * Tonya Pitts, One Market * Andrew Browne, Gary Danko * Les Tso, Le Cheval * Gianpaolo Paterlini, 1760 * Solomon Dove, Delfina
Fred Swan, Mark Guillaudeu, Commis * Brittany Klipper, Bouchon
NYC: Pasquale Jones wine team * Cari Bernard, Chambers St. Wines * Andy Newlin, Raoul's * Barbara Wong, The Modern * Aaron Zebrook, Le Coucou
Nicole Hakli, Momofuku Ssãm Bar * Jonas Mendoza, Crush Wine & Spirits
The label reproductions that appear in our tasting reports are a form of advertising. After we complete our tastings and record the results, our marketing team offers wineries the opportunity to draw attention to their reviews with label reproductions. There is no obligation to advertise, and our scores and reviews
are in no way affected by a winery's decision regarding advertising. Neither does advertising influence our selection of the wines we taste; our tastings are open to
all. All bottle reproductions in the magazine are purely editorial art.
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WINE & SPIRITS

FEBRUARY 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - February 2018