Anne Krebiehl MW
Wine highlights 2024
In 2024, there’s one wine that is utterly memorable – because it was the fizz we toasted our wedding with: Silverthorn, The Green Man Cap Classique 2021 (£24.25 Carte-du-Vin). My South Africa-born husband and I visited the wine farm and this exquisitely cool, luminous and creamy blanc de blancs was just perfect, as all the pre-wedding tension melted away. With happy tears still in my eyes and rose petals in my hair, this wine just hit the spot. Rarely has a glass of wine tasted so good. We had many more fabulous wines later, but none had quite the same impact.
Wine wishes 2025
In 2025, I hope to visit more producers closer to home, namely in southern England. Work meant that my focus has been very much on the Continent and I feel I’ve slightly lost track of all the exciting developments over here. There are so many new projects and producers, I really feel I have to catch up. Of course, I’m very drawn to the sparkling wines, but I’m also looking forward to exploring more English Pinot Noir.
Jonathan Cristaldi
Wine highlights 2024
One of my first tastings in 2024 was with Donelan Family Wines at their tasting room in Santa Rosa, California, with founder Joe Donelan, son Cushing and winemaker David Milner. Their Judge Vineyard Syrah 2021 (US$80) from Bennett Valley is a wine I can’t get out of my mind – it’s one of the most complex Syrahs from California I have ever tasted.
A few months later, I was in Italy being hosted by Natale Simonetta and his family at Cascina Baricchi in the Langhe. Natale opened a Barbaresco Riserva 2004 and as I prepared to take notes, he stopped me. ‘No work today, just drink and enjoy this,’ he said. It was such a gorgeous wine, supremely elegant and layered. Much later, back in California, I paid my first visit to Dunn Vineyards to taste several vintages of their Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignons. Interestingly, the 2019 releases (£133.33 in bond, Berry Bros & Rudd), which are medium-bodied, mineral-intense and energetic, left me thinking about Barolo.
Wine wishes 2025
As I plot out 2025, I’m aiming to cover even more ground in Napa Valley, Sonoma and Santa Barbara, and also plan to visit up-and-coming American wine regions in Texas and Michigan to understand how climate change is affecting growing conditions. A trip across the pond to Bordeaux is in my sights as well – because we always need to taste the benchmarks.
Jonathan Cristaldi with Natale Simonetta, Cascina Baricchi
Tom Hewson
Wine highlights 2024
Every time I visited Champagne in spring, the sun shone. ‘I’ve brought the English weather,’ I joked to the winemakers. By early summer, the charm wore off; 2024 was an onslaught, from the moment I heard hail clattering down onto the roof of an ancient Renault taxi hurtling through Aÿ to the sight of vineyards stripped bare of grapes by downy mildew in the Aube. Beyond a slew of top 2012s, tasting Louis Roederer’s upcoming Cristal 2016 – a year that 2024 has, in some ways, recalled – in Reims with chef de cave Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon was a reminder of just how fantastic the wines from difficult years can be.
Wine wishes 2025
As I head over in the spring to taste the vins clairs (the still base wines that will be blended into Champagnes), there’s optimism that 2024 may eventually be remembered for the right reasons in the region’s north, at least. The producers of the Aube might disagree – but despite this, I’m immensely excited about bringing their less-understood region to light for a major Decanter report in the spring. There are more hectares of vineyard here than in the Côte des Blancs, yet even the most hardened Champagne fans usually struggle to name more than a couple of villages or producers. It’s high time to change that.
Michaela Morris
Wine highlights 2024
My favourite commission this year was a piece on Barolo in the Noughties. As research, I enticed close friends to share wines from their cellars by cooking braised rabbit with tajarin. Superb Barolo and animated conversation flowed. Somehow, a magnum of Sandrone, Cannubi Boschis 1996 (£235.33 in bond, Crump Richmond Shaw) made it into the mix. Despite diverging from the theme, it was hauntingly expressive, gorgeously silky and drinking perfectly that night. I also count meeting Cantina Terlano’s charismatic director Klaus Gasser among my highlights. A keen wine aficionado, he opened gems from Selosse, Méo-Camuzet and Giacomo Conterno over dinner at the must-visit Miil Restaurant in Alto Adige. None, however, evoked as much emotion as the timeless and intricately nuanced 1955 Terlaner from the winery’s extraordinary archive.
Wine wishes 2025
I’m particularly excited about taking over the vintage reports for Barbaresco and Barolo; I’ve been visiting Piedmont religiously for the last two decades. I plan to venture beyond Italy as well. A bottle of Domaine Zafeirakis’ savoury and tangy Limniona 2020 (£26-£34 Blas ar Fwyd, Epinoia, EW Wines, Salusbury Winestore) at Noble Rot Lamb’s Conduit St restaurant in London earlier this year rekindled my obsession with returning to Greece. I lived there for a year in my early 20s but have never been back. I imagine I wouldn’t be too far out of my wheelhouse.
Klaus Gasser
Matt Walls
Wine highlights 2024
When I started working in wine 25 years ago, there was a strong bias in favour of reds – as if only red wines were truly capable of greatness. I’ve never felt that way. In fact, this year many of my most memorable bottles were white. A mature Domaine de Beaurenard, Châteauneuf-du-Pape Blanc 2009 was endlessly complex, rich and gastronomic; in true British style, I drank it with my mum, sitting in front of the TV. Bliss. Another wonderful white was Chapoutier’s Ermitage L’Ermite Blanc 2018 (£304.17ib-£366.95 Crop & Vine, Farr Vintners, VinQuinn, Vinvm), so luxurious and expansive. All the better for sharing it with my wife Louisa on a sunny August afternoon along with two juicy, smoky pork chops.
Wine wishes 2025
Germany might be famous for its Rieslings, but I was gobsmacked recently by an old-vine Syrah from Hanspeter Ziereisen in Baden that could pass for a Côte-Rôtie. Now I’m curious to explore other cool-climate European expressions – particularly those of Switzerland. Lastly, if I could make a wine wish for 2025, it would be this: that restaurants serve red wines cool, instead of at room temperature. Nothing worse than a glass of berry soup.
Victor and Antonin Coulon, Domaine de Beaurenard. Credit: Facenda N
Andrew Jefford
Wine highlights 2024
Two occasions stood out for me this year. A summer treat was catching up with Rick Kinzbrunner of Giaconda in Victoria, Australia, and drinking his deftly crafted, seamless 2021 Chardonnay together over lunch. Rick spends half his time in southern France, where I also live, but we hadn’t seen each other for some years: there was lots to talk over.
The most moving occasion, though, was an evening spent with Rosemary George MW and Michael and Monika Schuster at Rosemary’s house – as we remembered her husband Christopher, who had died the previous year. He had bought (many years ago) a case of 1982 Petrus (£3,500ib-£5,250 Cru, Grand Vin UK, Hedonism, Wilkinson Vintners). Rosemary decided there could be no better way to remember him than with one of the bottles – as well as a Château Trotanoy 1989 (£342-£363.20 Morgan Classic Wines, Seckford Wines).
The wines had excellent levels (Corney & Barrow’s storage passed with flying colours) and drank superbly: sumptuous, melting, glowing Right Bank treats. It was an evening of great warmth and merriment: just what Christopher would have wanted.
Wine wishes 2025
A wine region I’ve never had a chance to visit is Etna. Over the last decade, I’ve drunk and deeply enjoyed Etna whites and reds from time to time, and have also bought a couple of Terre Nere six-packs (from Justerini & Brooks). I love the combination of delicacy and grip in the reds (like a distant southern echo of Piedmont), as well as the intensity and singularity of the whites. Visiting the vineyards is an omission I hope to remedy… maybe in the coming year?
Terre Nere, on the northern slopes of Mount Etna, Sicily
Charles Curtis MW
Wine highlights 2024
Of the rich year of tasting that 2024 provided, my time in Burgundy this was perhaps the most memorable. There were many friends amid much hard work, but one day stands out. I organised several days of visits for my brother-in-law on the occasion of his 65th birthday, enlivened with vinous delights including a brace of wines from his birth year and a pair of 40-year-old wines from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.
On the penultimate day, however, we tasted at Domaine Comte Georgesde Vogüé with the new régisseur there, sampling each vineyard block separately; before dinner, we savoured bottles of the 1962 and 1964 vintages from a private collection. If the latter was more immediately forthcoming, with charming fruit and subtle complexity, the former opened with time to prove equally complex and perhaps more durable.
Wine wishes 2025
Decanter expanded my brief in 2024 to include Chablis and Beaujolais, and I enjoyed my first forays into these regions. I anticipate keenly my further exploration in 2025. The wines will doubtless be lovely, but I look forward almost as much to discovering more of the restaurants of these two regions and delving into the mature vintages on their wine lists, a near-indispensable adjunct to tasting this year’s crop.
Tim Atkin MW
Wine highlights 2024
Iberia had lost my luggage, my hotel room was noisy and the enveloping fog looked like the kind of thing Dickens describes in the opening pages of Bleak House. For five days in Valladolid, northwest Spain, in January, the sun struggled to perforate the gloom. I’d come to Rueda with lowish expectations – lots of commercial, well-made wines, but little that would be arresting – yet by the time the week was out I’d changed my mind about the Denominación de Origen and about the Verdejo grape, too. Wines like the Bodegas Pita, Terracota 2021 and the Garciarévalo, Harenna Tinaja 2022 were world-class revelations.
Wine wishes 2025
Next year, I’ll be spending even more time in Spain to work on a book about the country’s wines, but I’m also planning to visit the Hauts Plateaux region of Madagascar to look at a few vineyards – it’s not all rum, folks – and hang out with my friend, the photographer Pierrot Men, whose work I’ve collected for more than a decade. ‘Are the local wines drinkable?’ I asked him. ‘Plus ou moins [more or less],’ he replied, citing the island’s French influence. I’ll try them, but my aim is to come back with at least one photograph I’m proud of.
