Decanter pours it on

In my mailbox this morning was the announcement of Decanter Magazine’s 2022 World Wine Awards, which they bill as the largest and most inclusive tasting competition of its kind. I would be hard pressed to argue. Their reach is truly global, and a distinguished panel of experts undergoes a fairly rigorous and objective process to determine the medalists. Although most of Decanter’s content of interest is typically paywalled, you can search all the results freely from this landing page, which makes it newsworthy in our view.  They even have past years’ results available, so the total database swells to nearly 15,000 wines.

I spent a good half hour poking around and truth be told, I’ve never heard of most of the 165 wines labeled “Best in Show” for 2022.  It also seems to slant heavily to New World countries like Argentina, Australia and South Africa. If that’s not enough, you can search countries from Albania to Uruguay. I imagine a lot of the winning wines will be hard to find in the US, which is what makes wine-searcher.com so valuable if you’re so inclined.  And like all wine competitions of this kind, it’s undoubtedly constrained by what gets submitted for judging as opposed to everything out there they might have tasted. 

But again, it’s not often you get access to thousands of Decanter top ratings for free, so it’s worth a few minutes of your time, even if only to sort for your favorite countries, regions or grapes and to see what’s up, while it’s up.