James Melendez – JamesTheWineGuy | Demystifying Wine, Food, Travel & L...

This is my 15th edition of Top Wines of the Year.
This year’s list is a Top 50, rather than my usual Top 100. Quite simply, 2025 was a difficult year in which to taste wines. There were far fewer trade and media tastings, and significantly fewer sample bottles overall. Based on tariffs, inflation, and...

I’ve recently been reflecting on my early tastings of Eastern European wines. I have a good number of videos and tasting notes from that time, and in reviewing my scores, I realized that nearly every wine I tried was underrated—by 2 to 3 points, if not...

Valdobbiadene is a DOCG where sparkling wines are shaped by its distinctive topography and climate. Here, Adriatic breezes meet Alpine air, and a tapestry of rolling hills sets the stage for exceptional vineyards. The map below shows where this producer...

Mark Twain once said, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” This has often been misquoted as, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” For the purposes of this article, I’ve used the misquoted version for two reasons:
It’s the version most people recognize, and...