Wine Champions of 2021 Case

This year our buyers agreed with the many members who buy this popular, punchy and plump Spanish garnacha. Juicy, generous and satisfying, its hint of pepper spice made it stand out in a strong line-up at our Wine Champions tastings.

This clever blend of Gascon sauvignon blanc`s lemony crispness and Languedoc viognier`s fragrant apricotty charm went down just as well with our Wine Champions tasters as it does with the many members who buy it so enthusiastically each year. We are pleased to confirm the 2020 is an excellent year for this popular thirst quencher!

A vivid reminder of the unparalleled joys of good Muscadet, a style that deserves so much more attention than it currently receives. The excellent and ripe 2018 vintage garlands a little extra stone-fruited pleasure around this wine’s precise, delicate and fresh core. Classy, versatile wine. A Wine Champion in 2021.

‘Summer in a glass’; ‘swimming pool wine’; ‘my tasting note simply reads ‘superb’.’ Our buyers’ comments reflect just what a star this light, vividly refreshing, meadow-scented, gently spritzy and subtly stone-fruited Portuguese white was! A Wine Champion, Decanter World Wine Awards silver medal and International Wine Challenge bronze medal winner in 2021 and everything a good, honest Vinho Verde should be.

A 2021 Wine Champion. As buyer Matthew Horsley put it, ‘the standard of Beaujolais this year was amazing`, and this exciting taste of the 2020 vintage showed why it`s a great opportunity to get acquainted or reacquainted with the wines. After two fuller-bodied vintages, the freshness of this well-balanced, cherry-fruited favourite certainly perked up the tastebuds.

Praised for its generosity and crisp, peachy refreshment, this lovely wine rose above strong competition at our Wine Champions tasting due to its excellent-quality Limarí fruit and the Concha y Toro team’s sensitive and clever winemaking (it’s unoaked, but some lees are stirred through to enrich the palate but without masking the fruit).

Succulent pear and white-pepper aromas, nectarine and refreshing spritz on the palate make this a benchmark of Austria’s signature grape, from the historic Stadt Krems winery.

Smooth, generous and fragrant red from Sicily's nero d'Avola grape. This Italian red has been extremely popular since we introduced it, because it hits the spot and is great value. An International Wine Challenge and Decanter World Wine Awards bronze medal winner in 2021.

Finding such easy-drinking pleasure at this price can be a tricky business for a wine buyer, but when our team tasted the second vintage of this generous, fruit-filled Society wine blind during our Wine Champions sessions, we knew it had the x-factor. A bargain.

Another Loire highlight whose twist of red-berry fruit, streak of refreshing acidity (capable of cutting through all manner of dishes) and long finish for its price all amounted to a surefire Wine Champion.

Not content with festooning our Wine Champions podium with fantastic-value red wines, Sicily also contributed a pair of white wines that earned Championship status with aplomb. The first was this zingy, lemony vermentino, whose citrusy character and touch of white pepper proved very impressive for the price.

This great, bold red blend has all of the juicy vibrant cassis you would expect from Australia but with the balance and freshness that comes from Clare Valley-dominated fruit. A really good anyday drop.