Everyday Drinking Wrapped: Our Top 11 Wine Stories of 2025
Our most-read tasting reports of the year are much less embarrassing our Spotify Wrapped playlist.
Now that Thanksgiving is over, we’re all awaiting the imminent release of this year’s Spotify Wrapped. I’m certain I will, as usual, be mortified by what turns up among my most-listened-to songs in 2025—likely some embarrassing, moody EDM that played on loop for hours as background noise while I was in my writing flow. Or else songs from one of my “sad girl starter kit” playlists.
Anyway, I figured this would also be a good week for our own Everyday Drinking Wrapped, specifically our top 11 wine articles of the past year. It’s been a fascinating year in wine. We’re still very much in a worldwide wine crisis. And here in the U.S. we’ve been dealing with neo-prohibitionists and Trump’s tariffs.
Yet, amid the the bad news, there are plenty of good things happening in wine. As we saw in our big Everyday Drinking Wine Bar Index, published in late summer, the wine map is rapidly changing. Wines from Austria, Sicily, Catalonia, Portugal, and elsewhere are becoming more sought after than many classic prestige regions. White wine has overtaken red wine in popularity. Radical change has come to classic sparkling wine regions. The wine world is an exciting place right now, as you’ll see, scrolling through our most-read tasting reports of 2025.
1. Why White Wine Is The Future of Wine
The rise of white wine’s popularity—as well as the decline of red wine—is no longer anecdotal or apocryphal. The news that white and rosé now surpass red in worldwide consumption may have surprised a lot of people, but the data is real… white wine alone now accounts for 43 percent of global wine consumption, up 10 percent over the past two decades. In the U.S., the world’s biggest consumer of white wine, consumption rose 65 percent from 2000 to 2021. Meanwhile, worldwide red wine consumption is down more than 15 percent since 2007…
2. The Best Cava Is Not Called Cava
It’s just another reason why Corpinnat is redefining Spanish sparkling wine. “People around the world were thinking cava was only a massive, cheap wine But we can compete with any sparkling wine in the world,” said Ton Mata of Recaredo. “Corpinnat wants to play in the Champions League. We have a wonderful story, and it’s a true story.”
3. Portuguese Reds Are Having A Moment
Given how many people visit Portugal, I find it surprising that Portuguese wines, which I love, haven’t made more headway in the U.S. Well, maybe “surprising” is the wrong word. In the half-decade since I published Godforsaken Grapes, I’m intimately familiar with how wine’s gatekeepers sideline lesser-known wine regions and grape varieties.
4. What’s The Future of Jura Wines?
Over the past 15 years or so, the Jura has become a bit of a fetish among somms and the natural wine crowd for its “weird” wines…At any rate for most American wine drinkers, these wines have remained rather off-piste, if intriguing.
5. Our Wine Bar Index Shows What People Are Really Drinking
We crunched the data of New York’s top 30 wine bar menus. The results might surprise you (unless you’ve been paying attention).
Wine has undergone a generational shift in taste preferences. The prestige wines that Boomers loved—and which drove massive growth in the wine industry for over 30 years—just don’t appeal to younger generations of wine drinkers any more. This is not speculation or commentary. It’s a fact — one that’s too often dismissed by industry gatekeepers and big-name institutions who want to maintain the status quo of the wines coveted by older generations.
6. Does Blaufränkisch Need A Rebrand?
Some compare blaufränkisch from Burgenland to cru Beaujolais or northern Rhone syrah. But when I taste older vintages, great blaufränkisch reminds me of Nebbiolo. With the combination of juicy freshness, a savory core, surprising dark mineral notes like hot asphalt on a summer day, and beautiful aromas of rose petals, they could easily fool a lot of Barolo aficionados.
7. Reconsidering “Baby Brunello”
That’s not to say that there aren’t well-made—even great—Rosso di Montalcino wines out there. But if you are enamored by the fact that these wines are made by some legendary Brunello producers, you may be fooled by their middling quality. It’s faulty to assume that Rosso di Montalcino wines from well-known Brunello producers are all always going to be good.
8. In Champagne, Giving Meunier Some Love
If you accept this canned wisdom at face value, you’ll overlook some of the most singular wines coming out of Champagne right now: 100-percent meunier from grower-producers working old-vine parcels, often on long-overlooked terroir.
9. The Rise of Sicilian Wines
Wines from near the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna are some of the most sought-after Italian whites—and despite the popularity, they still offer very good value.
10. The New Tuscany
I had the chance to spend a week in Florence tasting wines at the annual Anteprima di Toscana. Plenty of what I tasted was rote and uninspiring, but much of it was truly surprising—especially L’Altra Toscana, or “Alt Tuscany,” including appellations like Carmignano, Cortona, Maremma, Montecucco, as well as a hodge-podge of innovative wines bottled as IGT Vino Toscana outside of the legacy regions. There’s a bunch of exciting things happening that not many people are really talking about.
11. Catalonia Wines Are Among the Most Exciting From Spain
Catalonia is also home to other mutations of the variety, including garnacha blanca (white), garnacha gris (grey), and garnacha peluda (literally “hairy” garnacha because of its furry leaves). Some of the most exciting Catalan wines, in fact, are these alternative garanchas.
