Wine Champions 2026

Video transcript

What are our buyers up to? Our buyers are currently doing the tastings for the 2026 edition of Wine Champions.

They’ve been spending three weeks tasting their way through hundreds of wines without any sight of the labels and voting for the ones that completely blow their collective socks off. Wine Champions is one of our biggest annual campaigns, and it’s something we’ve been doing at The Wine Society for more than a quarter of a century. This is actually one of the very few occasions during the year when all our buyers are in the same place.

Normally, at least a handful of them would be travelling, but we ground them so they can take part in this very important exercise. It’s quite studious in there at the moment, but trust me, when it comes to the scoring part of the tasting, the debate is going to get pretty lively. I’ve been involved with Wine Champions for quite a few years now, and I think the thing that impresses me most is still the rigour. The buyers are looking for the absolute best of the best, or, uh, our best for drinking now.

Very good.

Even very good isn’t good enough. Earlier this week, two absolutely glorious wines missed out on becoming Wine Champions by 1% of the threshold. It just didn’t completely blow one or two people away. Not good enough.

What does that mean for members, then?

It means you can turn to any of the bottles voted Wine Champions with total confidence that they are going to be an absolutely stupendous example of what they are. It’s a really nice way to find a cracking example of something you already love, or, even better, find something new and give yourself the confidence to try something that’s a bit different.