So much great wine is being made around the world right now that it’s hard to narrow our favorites this year to just 100 bottles. I personally traveled around the world four times during the year, visiting dozens of wine regions, meeting hundreds of winemakers and tasting thousands of wines. My team of 12 tasters did much the same, racking up visits across the globe, spending time with producers and rating bottles. In total, we reviewed more than 45,000 wines over the past 12 months.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the stories behind so many of the outstanding bottles we rated this year, along with the reporting from their respective regions. It’s not just about ratings – my team of writers and tasters and I also share the backstories in our weekly and monthly tasting reports, as well as in our regional reviews throughout the year.

One of the biggest stories this year was the release of the exceptional 2022 vintage in Bordeaux. I am still amazed how the wines, both reds and whites, have such focus and brightness despite coming from such an incredibly hot and dry year. And the vines held up under the heat.

Of course, most of the wines are high in alcohol, approaching 15 degrees, and also have high pH levels (low acidity). But this makes them very approachable to drink and illustrates that you don’t need to wait to pour young Bordeaux anymore. And they will only improve with age. Look at other hot and dry historic vintages in Bordeaux, such as 1982, 1959, 1947 and 1928, and you will find that many bottles are still alive and very drinkable.

This is why I chose the Château d'Issan Margaux 2022 as our Wine of the Year for 2025. I just drank a bottle a couple of nights ago before finishing this article and I was elated to enjoy such a glorious young bottle of Bordeaux. The opulent and complex fruit in the wine just kept me coming back with every sip. It’s luxurious, to say the least, with velvety tannins and complex flavors of currants, spices and mushrooms. Marie and I and two other colleagues finished the bottle in 20 minutes at the dinner table as we discussed the virtues of the wine. All we could say when our glasses were empty was, “Where did the bottle go?”

We gave higher ratings to many wines over the year, and some of those with 100 and 99 points are included in the list below. But I wanted everyone who loves great wine to have the chance to buy and taste our Wine of the Year. Great Bordeaux has excellent global distribution and significant production. Our estimated four million followers around the world buy and drink Bordeaux, and with d’Issan’s 2022 production of about 105,000 bottles, it should be relatively easy to find. Moreover, it won’t cost a fortune – it sells for about $70 a bottle.

The availability of d’Issan and other 2022 Bordeaux was a key factor in including so many Bordeaux on the list this year. For the Top 10, I tried to only include wines with a minimum production of 12,000 bottles. It’s difficult to find great wines with such significant production levels, but I did.

It reminds me of what the late, great French enologist Emile Peynaud – arguably one of the fathers of modern fine wine – told me in Bordeaux when I was in my mid-20s. He said that many places in the world can make wines of outstanding quality, but only a few can make truly exceptional ones, and those regions are limited depending on the country. He added that France had more great terroir than anywhere else – but that was 40 years ago! I wonder what he would say today.

Plentiful production and a reasonable price were key factors for why I also placed the Château Giscours Margaux 2022 at No. 8 on this list. In addition, Bordeaux’s Medoc region excelled in 2022 with the help of a preponderance of cabernet sauvignon planted in its vineyards. The significant amount of merlot in the subregion of Margaux, where both d’Issan and Giscours are located, helped take the edge off some of the young tannins in the wines. They are both delicious but will age very well in the future.

Drinkability is another key criterion in how we rate wines at JamesSuckling.com. It’s not about massive powerful wines but about those with balance for the vintage – ones that show well right out of the bottle and even from the barrel. We also think about what I call the “wow" factor. Great wines not only satisfy your taste buds, they touch your mind, heart and soul.

One of the key criteria for all wines in the Top 100 was a production of around 5,000 bottles or more, a price under $200 a bottle and a JamesSuckling.com rating of at least 98 points. For the Top 10, besides the elevated, 12,000-bottle production level, wines also needed 98 points or more and a price under $100 per bottle, based on Wine-Searcher.com data.

This left a lot well-known and revered wines off our list, especially from Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne, Napa, Barolo and Tuscany. Many were too expensive.

Let me be frank. A lot of wine today is too expensive, especially most of the very best. Price corrections are already happening in the market, as we all know. And I am not blaming high prices for the decline in wine consumption in most parts of the world – with the exception of some parts of Asia. It think it’s more about economics and how life in general has become so expensive. But that’s a story for another time.

However, a lot of excellent wine is still well-priced and we are constantly out in the world looking for them. Some of the best places to buy them at the moment are Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Germany, Austria, Portugal and some states in America such as New York, Virginia and Texas. Fifty of the wines on our list are priced below $100 a bottle and about 10 cost less than $50.

You might be surprised, but our No. 3 and No. 4 wines – the Jean-Marc Burgaud Morgon Côte du Py 2023 and Terra Sancta Pinot Noir Central Otago Bannockburn Mysterious Diggings 2024 – are around $25 a bottle. They’re stunning wines. I visited Terra Sancta two weeks ago in the New Zealand town of Bannockburn, Central Otago, and the vineyards – mostly ungrafted and planted in the early 1990s – were among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, with organic and regenerative viticulture. The winery doesn’t even have a U.S. importer. I’m still shaking my head in disbelief.

And what about Beaujolais? It still remains one of the most underappreciated wine regions in the world, yet it has one of the highest percentages of old vineyards in the world. The best producers adhere to traditional viticultural methods and organic or biodynamic farming. And the wines are great right out of the barrel and into the bottle. Drink gamay!

I don’t believe that “never chardonnay” is a motto for any serious wine lover. Some of the best whites in the world are chardonnay – white Burgundy, for one. Today, many of the top examples have moved away from excessive alcohol and oak, showing instead the character of their vineyards, microclimates and soils. That’s why we loved the three in our Top 10: the Errázuriz Chardonnay Aconcagua Costa Las Pizarras 2023 (No. 7) from Chile, Peter Michael Winery Chardonnay Sonoma County Knights Valley Belle-Cote 2023 (No. 9) from Sonoma County and Tolpuddle Chardonnay 2024 (No. 10) from Tasmania.

Pinot noir is a love of mine and RAEN is one of my favorites. It’s vineyards on the Sonoma Coast are unique in the world with its morning fog and bright sun in the afternoon. And the viticulture is meticulous, not to mention the winemaking with almost all whole bunch fermentations.

Carlo and Dante Mondavi, the sons of Napa’s Tim Mondavi and grandsons of the legend Robert Mondavi, are honest and thoughtful men with the foresight of their winemaking family and the integrity for what the wine world needs today. Carlo says his RAEN Pinot Noir Sonoma County Sonoma Coast Royal St. Robert 2023 well represents the vintage, which is his best ever.

The Arterberry Maresh Pinot Noir Dundee Hills Maresh 2023 is equally compelling, and it’s half the price of the RAEN wine. Oregon continues to make fantastic pinot noir at a fraction of the price of the best from California and Burgundy, for that matter.

Finally, the Pieropan Soave Classico La Rocca 2023 is a white you should be able to find wherever you are. It’s a benchmark in the world of Italian wine and highlights the unique character of Soave with its class and sophistication. The Pieropan family put well-made, vineyard-driven Soave on the map. This was No. 2 on our Top 100 Wines of Italy 2025 list.

Our Italian Wine of the Year was the Tenuta delle Terre Nere Etna Rosso San Lorenzo 2023, an incredible wine from the volcanic Etna wine region of Sicily, but the red was too small in production to be higher than No. 23 on this Top 100 Wines of the World list. Heads up on Etna wines in general – they’re great value considering their incredible quality and character. Most are around $50 a bottle.

Sometimes it’s overwhelming – even for me, after 44 years of writing about wine and first tasting wine with my late father almost half a century ago in Los Angeles – to think about all the great wine being made around the world today. Etna wasn’t producing serious wine in the 1980s. Vineyards were few and far between in places like New Zealand. Austria made only sweet wines.

I still remember tasting for The Wine Spectator in the early 1980s, when a handful of us would gather around a table hoping to find a 92-point wine – if we were lucky. So many wines weren’t well made back then. Today, it’s almost the complete opposite. There are so many great bottles from every corner of the world. It truly is a golden moment for wine, and I hope our Top 100 Wines of the World 2025 proves that beyond a doubt.

– James Suckling, CEO & Publisher

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team over the past 12 months. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. 

Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.