With the lockdowns of COVID-19 getting ever smaller in our collective rear-view mirror, 2023 was a year of growing comfort and excitement for winemakers and wine drinkers alike. As the public embraced the return to normalcy for travel and social gatherings, many people enjoyed the pleasures of being together, around a table with good friends and family—and, of course, great food and wine.
This year’s favorite WineSpectator.com feature articles and tasting reports run the gamut from hearty recipes to make at home to elite fine dining experiences, from supermarket vino to California collectibles. And no matter where you find your niche in the wide world of wine, our ever-popular Wine IQ Quizzes and Games will always keep you on your toes.
Click on each headline below to enjoy the best of 2023!
Top Features and Games of 2023
1. Somms Tell It Straight: Advice from Your Friendly Neighborhood Wine Experts
If you’ve ever scoffed at the idea of buying wine from the grocery store, check out WineSpectator.com’s most-read feature of 2023, a Sommelier Roundtable in which top wine pros shared their picks for the best bottles to buy at the supermarket. To demonstrate that you can find wine gems while also picking up breakfast cereal and frozen foods, we asked somms from 11 U.S. Grand Award–winners—representing the best of the best restaurant wine programs—for their grocery go-tos, the bottles they pick for convenience but love for their character.
A late-summer roundtable garnered equal excitement, when sommeliers from top football-loving towns chimed in on the best wines for tailgating as the 2023 season kicked off for America’s favorite Friday-night entertainment. Which wines are best served in a red Solo cup? Read on to find out!
2. Roll Out the Red Carpet: 2023’s Top Restaurants in Wine
Every summer, Wine Spectator announces its much-anticipated list of Restaurant Award winners, honoring the best wine programs around the world. In 2023, the dining and hospitality industries both roared back to life, with exciting new restaurants opening and stalwarts re-investing in their wine cellars. More than 3,500 restaurants from all 50 states and more than 75 countries and territories garnered one of our elite awards.
So, where to begin exploring? Start with these 10 recent debuts that captured our attention—all earned their first Wine Spectator Restaurant Award in 2023—or 12 rising stars who were upgraded to Best of Award of Excellence last year. Our Restaurant Guides are regularly updated with the best wine restaurants in regional or thematic catagories, and this recently expanded list of Napa Valley’s best restaurants for wine country dining was one of 2023’s most-read.
Another guide of interest was New York City’s fine-dining restaurants with the best wine lists, representing all the Grand Awards among the 180 Restaurant Award winners in the Big Apple. Farther afield, our 12 bucket-list-worthy restaurants around the world will have you planning your next trip around these top destinations, whether it be to Europe, Asia, Australia or North America!
3. W.A.I.T., What Am I Tasting?
Our online blind-tasting game—without any actual wine, of course—pairs perfectly with your morning crossword or sudoku. Many wine lovers devotedly follow the twice-monthly What Am I Tasting games, in which we post an actual tasting note from which readers then try to correctly identify the grape, origin and age of the mystery wine. How well would you do at this? Find out today!
4. Trivia Night, Wine Spectator Style
Our online quizzes are another favorite of our digital readers, with this year’s most popular topics testing participants on bubbly brain-scratchers, Sangiovese smarts, vino vocabulary and a wine-themed spelling bee. But 2023’s kick-off quiz took the cake for most clicks, featuring the hardest questions from 2022.
5. 2023’s Favorite Recipe: Julia Child’s Catalan Beef Stew, Simplified
Julia Child’s recipes for the home chef are still fan favorites even 62 years after the publication of her world-wide bestseller Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She can truly do no wrong, especially when it comes to luxurious yet simple stews, as demonstrated here. Wine Spectator’s Julia Larson created a streamlined rendition of Child’s original Boeuf à la Catalane for the 8 & $20 column, which provides readers with weeknight-friendly recipes that require only eight purchased ingredients (plus pantry staples) and pair with a good bottle of wine for $20 or less.
This variation, suited for small kitchens, cuts down on the number of pots and pans required and carefully increases the heat to slash the cooking time in half, creating an end-of-winter feast with no hassle. Pair it with a bold Spanish red, such as Bodegas Beronia’s Tempranillo Rioja Crianza 2018, which only costs $15. Get the recipe!
6. The People Behind the Wine: 2023’s Top Profiles and Interviews
California's Old-Vine Connoisseurs
Italy-based contributing editor Robert Camuto headed to California and struck gold with his visit with two prominent members of the state’s nonprofit Historic Vineyard Society, Tegan Passalacqua and Morgan Twain-Peterson. These two winemaker friends share a passion for the preservation of aged—often pre-Prohibition era—vineyards, and they have developed a specialty in field blends from these old, typically organic, dry-farmed plots. Join Camuto, Passalacqua and Twain-Peterson on a tour of vineyard centenarians and learn more about Sonoma County’s viticultural history.
Wine Wizard of All: California Grocer Darrell Corti
America’s most revered grocer, Darrell Corti, got some well-deserved time in the spotlight in this edition of Robert Camuto Meets … . From his sprawling Corti Brothers family grocery in Sacramento, the 81-year-old Corti has helped shape the wine landscape for 60 years—a pre–social media culinary influencer—and has plenty of stories to share. Want to know how White Zinfandel was born? Or the shelf price of the first Conterno Barolo Monfortino vintage (1968) he helped bring to America? Find out in Camuto’s conversation with Corti here.
Wine Talk: The Man Behind the World's Largest Cork Producer
How have natural corks stayed on top of the wine world for centuries, despite competition? To find out, readers flocked to senior editor Aaron Romano’s interview with Antonio Amorim, who as chairman and CEO helped modernize Portugal-based Amorim Cork, the world’s largest cork producer. Their discussion uncorked topics such as sustainability practices and industry innovations, as well as the history of his family’s business. Read the full interview!
7. 2023’s Best Holiday Gifts for Wine Lovers
Getting gifts for the enophile in your life can be bewildering: What gadgets are just going to gather dust? What do they already have? What’s actually useful versus a bunch of marketing hype? Wine Spectator asked 14 top sommeliers across the United States and Canada which items they think make fabulous gifts. They came back with ideas that any wine lover would greatly appreciate, from stunning decanters to practical wine bags to top-notch wine openers. Read on to get their recs!
Top Tasting Reports of 2023
1. Top 100 Wines of 2023
Every year, readers flock to our site to see which wines have been named the best of the year for their combination of quality, value, availability and excitement—and 2023 was no different. The reveal of our Top 10 list and Wine of the Year generated quite the buzz, with Argiano’s exemplary 2018 Brunello di Montalcino taking the top honor. Classic bottlings from Tuscany’s Antinori and Bordeaux’s Lynch-Bages and Pichon Baron also made the cut, joined by newcomers to the Top 10 such as New Zealand’s Greywacke, with its impressive 95-point Sauvignon Blanc priced at only $23. The top spots were filled out by West Coast Pinot Noirs from Occidental, Raen and Résonance, Napa Cabernet from Dunn and a beautiful Aglianico from Campania’s flagship producer, Mastroberardino. Beyond the Top 10, almost half of the wineries in the Top 100 were first-time honorees, and many great values made the cut. More than half the wines are priced at or under $50, and more than a quarter only $25 or less. See the full list!
2. Top 10 Wine Values of 2022 and Wine Value of the Year
On the topic of values, 2023 was the second time our editors honored the Top 10 Wine Values of the Year from the previous year’s tastings, to celebrate wines that display unmatched quality for accessible prices. From a $20 Tuscan red to a $27 white Burgundy, all of the wines on this list were rated 90 points or higher, cost under $40, and were made in large enough quantities that they can be found at most local wine shops. The 2022 Wine Value of the Year is an exciting standard-bearer for Napa Valley Cabernet, a category difficult to source at low prices. Beaulieu Vineyard’s 2019 vintage is outstanding, and at only $33 a bottle and over 40,000 cases produced, a more friendly value wine will be hard to find. Explore the other nine honorees sure to please your palate and your wallet in our list of 2022’s top wine values.
3. 2023 Beaujolais Nouveau: A Solid Year for Fun Wines
Every November, the third Thursday of the month marks a wine “holiday” that has become something of a pre-Thanksgiving ritual in the United States: Beaujolais Nouveau Day. A now-global marketing occasion, Nouveau Day celebrates the Beaujolais region’s vins de primeur: fresh, simple wines that are bottled soon after harvest to be enjoyed young—part of a long tradition across many European wine regions. Holiday-ready Americans are quick to procure these food-friendly, enjoyable, affordable wines to pair with their own harvest celebrations. For the wine-serious, these early-release wines can provide an advance peek at what to expect from Beaujolais’ higher-end wines to come later. As always, Wine Spectator provided readers with the low-down: from analysis of the vintage to scores and tasting notes for eight 2023 Beaujolais Nouveau wines that had already arrived in the States. Read on for our 2023 Nouveau reviews!
4. Stylish Sonoma Wines Up to 92 Points
Sonoma County offers a diverse landscape for growing wine grape varieties, encompassing 19 different American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) across more than 1,500 square miles of land. Encompassing Chardonnay, Zinfandel, Sauvignon Blanc and more, this “Tasting Highlights” covers a range of producers and styles from one of California’s prime regions.
5. West Coast Pinot Noir Wins the Day
This fan-favorite variety had a string of hits in 2023 as readers eagerly tracked the releases of the promising 2021 vintage Pinot Noirs from California and Oregon, after the wildfire-related challenges of 2020. Overall, the 2021 Pinots are fresh and vibrant, but as senior editor Tim Fish puts it, “Oregon and California Pinot Noirs are like fraternal twins: similar but not identical.” Our readers eagerly sought out top bottles from both states, as in this Oregon Tasting Highlight featuring 8 outstanding Pinots that cost $35 or less; 10 Dazzling Sonoma and Oregon Pinots, and 8 Outstanding 2021 Pinot Noirs from Sonoma, Mendocino and Monterey.
6. Outstanding Bordeaux-Style Reds from Around the Globe
Bordeaux's primary red grapes (Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Malbec and Carmenère) have spread far beyond the French region’s borders. While Bordeaux and other acclaimed areas like Napa Valley offer many of the most coveted bottlings, this selection features high-scoring examples of Bordeaux-style blends from farther afield, and at more reasonable prices.
7. Gorgeous Italian Wines at 90+ Points
With around 2,000 grape varieties and a vast number of terroirs, Italy is an excellent playground for wine lovers looking to explore diverse styles. One of our readers’ favorite tasting highlights this year featured a range of Italian regions and grapes, many of which cost under $30, such as a 90-point Valpolicella Ripasso Classico Superiore for only $28 or an $18, 90-point Greco di Tufo white from southern Italy. Explore these picks!
8. Outstanding Value Wines Under $30
Readers’ ongoing search for good wine at an affordable price brought many of them to this list featuring some very food-friendly wines—all under $30 and all scoring 90 points or higher—to try pairing with weeknight meals. If you don’t have the urge to splurge, these wines will not disappoint, and will turn any normal meal into a festive occasion.
9. Excellent Washington Red Wine Values Up to 91 Points
Washington is one of the most versatile regions when it comes to grape varieties, with Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling thriving in its cooler climes, as well as Syrah and Grenache in its balmier regions. But among all these choices, senior editor Tim Fish’s selection of new releases shows that the state can make top-notch Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and blends that are also great values, not just luxuries. Catch up on the reviews for these recently rated wines under $30.
