By Jon Bonne Orginally posted December 20, 2017
If at PUNCH we hesitate to casually drop the word “best,” we do love to talk about what’s new and what’s delicious.
And new, especially, matters a lot in wine today. Wine is dynamic, and today, more than ever, the wine world is guided by curiosity and a need to find new talents, new flavors and new interpretations of place—or at least to find new improvements upon old things, given the neotraditionalism that has made its way into many cellars around the world.
That brings us to our second annual edition of the PUNCH Hot 25, a collection of essential wines that define what we love drinking right now. Yes, it’s meant to be a barometer of zeitgeist, which is why I was thrilled to see wines like the Les Capriades pét-nat being served everywhere from New York’s Mission Chinese Food to Minneapolis’ The Bachelor Farmer. But this isn’t just a cross-section of wines that define how we’re drinking now—it’s a window into how we’re likely to be drinking in years to come. It’s also meant to telegraph some messages about how we at PUNCH see the wine world at the end of 2017.
Which is to say: glorious and complicated and more than a bit fraught. The rewriting of wine’s geography and hierarchy is on overdrive—and not just in places like Champagne and Beaujolais, but in corners of the Loire, Australia, even California. The very idea of “great” wine is under scrutiny, perhaps because the old canon is too expensive for much of a new generation. Instead we find solace in really good wines—wines of variable pedigree that stop you and force you to notice their sheer beauty and intrigue. Every bottle in the lineup below evoked that response.
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