It was another active year for wine events in 2025, and I tasted a lot of wines through the year. Being a long time wine aficionado and collector - in my case for over 35 years - I am privileged to try many fantastic wines which would other wise be out of reach.
Using a representative sample of wines I tasted my average score is ~91.5 with a standard deviation of roughly three, which means around two thirds of the wines I score would fall in the 89-94 range - this is a purely subjective score method widely used and accepted by others, however dubious the methodology.
Last year I listed my top 200 wines of the year in ascending (presented in descending) order. This time I will start the ball rolling with wines I subjectively rated 93 points, moving upwards from there. Given how privileged I am to access so many reputable wines, most of these extraordinarily good.
In fact there were a lot of excellent wines I scored 92 points in 2025, which did not make the cut. I here list 67 wines I rated 93 points, and the list of 92 rated wines would undoubtedly be even longer. These 93 point rates wines are in order of the approximate time of the year I drank them and not on relative merit.
Bordeaux dominates this batch as I am sure it will dominate the next few batches with 23 wines or 34% of the total, followed by Piedmont (9), white burgundy (8), Northern Rhone (7), Loire (red and sweet white, 5), champagne (3), red burgundy, Germany, Tuscany and New Zealand (2 each) and Jura, Spain, Lebanon and Oregon (1 each).
