The Wine & Spirits Magazine Top 100 wineries

There are many lists handed out each year, telling us about some sort of rank-order of wines and/or wineries; e.g. Drinks International magazine: The World’s Most Admired Wine Brands (What is a "most admired" wine brand?). One potential problem with such lists is that they tend to change each year (see: The Most Admired Wine Brands are very different this year). However, these sorts of lists are often fun to look at, anyway.

Each year, Wine & Spirits Magazine unveils their Top 100 Wineries of the Year (currently: Announcing the Top 100 Wineries of 2022). This is the list that I will look at here.

The list of wineries is compiled as determined by “their exceptional performance in our tastings this year”, based on “vetting thousands of producers via the magazine’s exclusive two-step blind-tasting process.” This process has been described in more detail in: How a ‘Top 100 Wineries’ list actually happens: a peek behind the scenes.

Since the wines tasted vary from year to year, and you can look at each individual list of wineries for yourselves, I will instead look here at the consistency of the wineries in the lists across several years. There is no necessary connection between these winery—years, because each list is based on the wine scores solely for that year. Nevertheless, if winery quality means anything, then the same wineries should get listed each year (provided that their wines were tasted), even if their order changes.

The first time the magazine produced a Wineries of the Year list was way back in 1987. However, let’s start by first looking at the past 9 years only — this should provide a list of [some of] the currently prominent wineries. There were 427 wineries listed in at least one of these 9 years. The number of times they were listed were:

    No. years    No. wineries
        9                2
        8                2
        7                11
        6                11
        5                15
        4                32
        3                49
        2                68
        1                237

So, only two of the wineries were listed in all nine years; this is not too good, if we are looking for consistency. The 26 top-listed wineries were as shown in this next table.

Most of these wineries come from California (8), followed by Italy (5) and Oregon (4). To me, this seems to be more than a little bit biased, geographically speaking.

If we now look at the previous 26 years, the list is quite different, as shown in this new table (below). This shows the number of times the top-listed wineries appeared (only those that appeared in at least half of the yearly lists), and compares this to the recent 9 years. As you can see, only Concha y Toro, Penfolds, and Marchesi Antinori did well in both sets of years. That is, the current Top 100 wineries are not the same as they once were; perhaps we should not really be surprised?

This means that we should now look at all 35 years, simultaneously, if we want an overview of the past 3½ decades. This is shown for the most successful wineries in the figure below. In this case, a dot means that the named winery was listed in the Top 100 in that year.

As you can see, only 9 wineries appeared in at least half of the yearly lists. Penfolds topped the score-sheet (29/35 appearances), followed by Concha y Toro (27/35). Of these top nine wineries, Penfolds, Concha y Toro, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Ridge Vineyards, Marchesi Antinori and Iron Horse did consistently quite well (across the years), whereas Boutari and Louis Jadot did well only in the early years, and Diamond Creek Vineyards did well later.

So, there you have it. These apparently are the top wineries, in the world, according to the annual wine tastings of Wine & Spirits Magazine. I have no objection to any of them being in the list; but I can think of one or two others that should be there, as well. I am sure that you can, too!