Wine & Spirits

3 4 TH ANNUAL B UY I NG G UI D E

What We Believe

W&S critics, from left to right:
Joshua Greene, Tara Q. Thomas,
Patrick J. Comiskey, Stephanie Johnson
and Rachel DelRocco Terrazas.

Our mission is to help you discover great wines. To find them...

We rate wines without knowing the brand.
All the wines we review are tasted blind, in
our offices, or, during the pandemic, outdoors and closer to home. Our ﬁrst round is
with restaurant and retail buyers whom we
respect for knowing their own tastes. We give
them information on vintage, region and
variety and ask them if they would recommend the wine to a friend. Then our wine
editor assigned to that regional beat tastes
the recommended wines again, with the
same limited information, to consider how
delicious and distinctive the wines might be,
and to compare them with others he or she
has tasted from the same region. Not knowing the producer allows us to judge the wine
fairly, without prejudice. We set up this process because we know we are human, and
may well be swayed by the reputation of a
wine, by tasting with the people who make
or market the wine, or by tasting wines in the
place where they are made.
We embrace different opinions.
While we may develop preferences for certain styles, our pact with you, our readers,
is to leave those preferences at the door of
our tasting room. Our wine editors look to
our panelists to help us better understand
our own preferences and prejudices. During
the pandemic, we have engaged with panel6

WINE & SPIRITS

ists either through socially distant outdoor
blind tastings, or by tasting together by video
conference, our bottles sheathed in numbered bags. However we collaborate, we look
for balance and harmony in the wines we
taste. And for the greatest wines, we look for
identity.
We believe in spending time with a wine.
Often our editors will taste a wine over a
number of days, to consider how it evolves.
We believe the progression of ﬂavor development in a wine is a part of its identity and
that great wine should beneﬁt from oxygen,
or, at least, be resistant to its negative forces
and not quickly dissolve into volatility. We
consider this a valuable assay, as well as a predictor of a wine's potential development in
your cellar.
We learn from history and facts.
Our loyalty is with you, our readers. As much
as we trust our senses, after we've taken our
notes, rated the wine and discovered its identity, we also want to know the facts: who
made the wine, where it grew, how it was
farmed and guided from harvest to bottle.
In our tasting notes, we share our research
with you.
We believe sensitive farming sustains the
identity of a wine's origin in the bottle.
Having tasted an unnatural amount of wine
in our short lives, and having researched the
wines that excite us most, we have come to
believe that sensitive farming is crucial to
connecting a wine's ﬂavor to where it was
grown. Some vintners are especially aware of

BUYING GUIDE 2021

how farming impacts the microbial life in the
ground, the plants and their fruit as well as
their own well-being. We can't prove the connection, but we believe their work magniﬁes
and sustains the wine's ﬂavor identity.
We invite you to taste for yourself.
We will gather our Top 100 Wineries at our
Virtual Top 100 event this year, for online
tastings with winemakers and our wine
editors (wineandspiritsmagazine.com/
top100virtual). We invite you to join us in
our online tasting panels and share in the
buzz around this remarkable and distinctive
collection of wines. Q

OUR CRITICS
Patrick J. Comiskey:
New York, Oregon, Washington and,
in California, Central Coast and
Sierra Foothills.
Joshua Greene:
California's North Coast, Northern France,
Iberia, Australia, Chile and New Zealand.
Stephanie Johnson:
Italy.
Rachel DelRocco Terrazas:
Mexico, South Africa, eastern and
southern Spain.
Tara Q. Thomas:
Austria, Germany, Eastern Europe, the
Mediterranean and Argentina.

PHOTO OF JOSHUA GREENE BY KELLY PULEIO; TARA Q. THOMAS BY NICOLA PARISI

We trust our senses.
All of our reporting on wine is driven by our
senses of sight, smell, taste and touch. When
we respond to a wine with pleasure, we don't
care whether or not it is highly regarded in
the market. We want to ﬁnd out more.

http://www.wineandspiritsmagazine.com/

Wine & Spirits - Winter 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - Winter 2020

Wine & Spirits - Winter 2020 - 6

Wine & Spirits - Winter 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - Winter 2020