A case for greatness: 12 Outstanding wines

Only after deciding how we want to rate a wine do we learn what it is. Our top rating is “Outstanding!” (Photo by Darlene Hildebrandt/Digital Photo Mentor)

Over the course of a year, we taste and evaluate upward of 5,000 wines. We always taste under blind conditions, meaning we don’t know the producer or the price.

Tasting blind is important to us because we want to remove as many influences as possible to evaluate each wine as fairly as possible. Once we write up our notes and decide how we want to rate the wine, we will learn what it is.

We use four levels of rating a wine: Outstanding, Excellent, Recommended and not recommended. If we can’t recommend a wine, we will retaste it (if we have a second bottle). We write up only wines we can recommend.

All wines are submitted by wineries for review.

Here are a dozen wines that earned our top “Outstanding!” rating in recent weeks.

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