![]() The other finalists were Charles Smith Wines from Washington State, Linden Vineyards from Virginia, Ridge Vineyards from California, Château Pontet-Canet and Domaine Paul Mas from France, and Taylor-Fladgate from Portugal. Honorable mention went to Burgundy's venerable Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and to another California winery, Tablas Creek. Our winner last year was not the newest, most obscure favorite of America's coolest wine stewards, but the Napa Valley's 1971-vintage Smith-Madrone Vineyards & Winery, known primarily for their exemplary cabernet sauvignon and their unexpectedly sophisticated riesling. The idea is to hail one wine producer from anywhere in the world (we're also acknowledging two runners-up) that has produced consistently fine wines over a substantial period of time but has also served as an innovator and/or inspiration in the world of wine, whether dynamically or simply by example.īecause we have access to wines from every corner of the world, we threw the field wide open, and asked a panel composed of wine writers and bloggers (including our own regular wine contributors), sommeliers and wine merchants, and wine-savvy chefs to offer us their nominations for this honor. Now, for the second time, we are honoring a Winery of the Year as well. That's an immense number of producers to try to get a handle on, but try we have.įor the past five years, The Daily Meal has named two Chefs of the Year, one American, one international, and for the past three years, we've also singled out an American Restaurant of the Year. Even the U.S., which is new to winemaking compared to our European counterparts, has at least 8,000. That may or may not be in the right ballpark - but there are more than 900,000 designated vineyards in Italy (not every one corresponding to a winery, of course, though many of them do) and about 28,000 actual wineries in France. Nobody knows exactly how many wineries or wine-producing entities there are around the world, but some estimates put the number as high as two million. What that means is that American wine-lovers have the chance to sample wines bearing thousands upon thousands of different labels, wines made from grapes both famous and obscure, wines priced from almost nothing (hello, Three-Buck Chuck) to thousands of dollars. Then there's our own wealth of wine, not just from the major players - California, Oregon, Washington, and New York - but from Virginia, Michigan, Idaho, Texas, and literally every other state in the union (though Alaska's wines are admittedly made with juice from elsewhere). The adventurous can sniff out bottles from Moldova and Croatia, Lebanon and Turkey, Switzerland and Luxembourg, Mexico and India and Japan. The great wine icons of Italy, France, Germany, and Spain are on our wineshop shelves (often behind locked glass doors).The supermarkets (of our more enlightened states, at any rate) offer aisles upon aisles of pinot grigio, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, and more from Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and California, and grüner veltliner from Austria has become practically a commonplace. It seems safe to say that in America we have access to a wider variety of wines, at every price level, in every degree of quality,from every corner of the winemaking world, than any other nation.
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