When wine is your job, you get asked many dozens of times, “What is the best wine?”. If you are at all a responsible and prudent person, the answer is long-winded and noncommittal. While wine quality can be objective, the enjoyment of wine is very personal, and ultimately, we want you to enjoy that wine in your glass above all else. 

The Best Wines series gives us an opportunity to say unabashedly and without reservation—this, this is the best wine!

Join us for the first in our series and likely the most suited to this format, a category of wines with such a distinct character, that an entire portfolio was dedicated to them using the chemical compound they all share, sotolon. Sotolon Selections is a unique portfolio focusing primarily on historic categories of aged, and oxidative wine. In both process and expression, these represent links to some of our oldest winemaking traditions, their lineage extending back to the wines most prized by the ancient Greeks and Romans. They are wines transformed by time, by exposure to oxygen, and often heat, culminating in a complex “taste of age” and the trait known as “rancio”: the spicy, caramelized flavors in oxidative wines and spirits which—dry or sweet—can evoke roasted nuts; dried tropical fruit; tobacco, cocoa or coffee; and spices ranging from fenugreek to saffron.