The Best of 2002

Tastings Top 100

by Marc Dornan, dornan@tastings.com

4952 wine reviews were posted to Tastings.com throughout 2002: A bald fact that covers many thousands of pulled corks and untold dishwasher cycles, not to mention sniffing and swirling. Mere scores and listgs never quite do justice the prose of a tasting note and while they are not to be slavishly followed, they undeniably have a sexy simplicity that is user friendly.

The following list is merely what the computer generated when asked to report the 100 top scoring wines of the last year, irrespective of country, producer, or category. As always it is slightly biased towards red wines over whites, but fruit, fortified and sparkling wines also make themselves known. I can promise you that every wine registered high on the pleasure barometer whether it was the complex Burgundian offering of Peter Mc Coy's 1998 Le “Bijou” Russian River Valley Chardonnay or the completely different, but no less intense, Maine Blueberry and oak flavors of Bartlett's two Blueberry wine offerings. Hardly any of the Top 100 wines will be found in the $9.99 value section. Quite a few selections were never readily available on retailers' shelves and will be a challenge to find now but the point of this exercise is less to produce a shopping list than a distillation of the collective wisdom of the staff and guest tasters who have toiled in the pursuit of identifying excellence in a glass.