Jane Anson: My top 10 fine wines of 2020

Looking again at my top wines of 2019, the list was drawn from bottles tasted at a friend’s birthday party, a private Figeac dinner for 20 people, and a lavish, extremely starry Mouton Rothschild charity event for several hundred people at the Palace of Versailles.

The round-up also included wines tasted at a hotel in St-Emilion with a group from the Napa Valley Reserve in California, a small dinner at New York’s Vaucluse restaurant, a private supper in Pomerol, a local restaurant in Bordeaux, and during a château visit up in the Médoc.

There was just one from an evening at home, and even then it was cooking for a friend who was visiting from Scotland.

This year, seven of the 10 wines were tasted at my house, five of them in front of a computer screen during a Zoom tasting.

Scroll down to see tasting notes for Jane Anson’s top 10 fine wines of 2020

Only one of the three that managed to escape the confines of my front room were tasted under normal conditions.

That was the JJ Prüm Riesling, which was a highlight of a fascinating symposium on ungrafted vines with winemakers from around the world, held back in January 2020 when we all thought this was going to be a year like any other.

The second symposium planned for January 2021 has, I don’t suppose I have to tell you, been postponed for a while…

Despite all of that, it’s been a huge pleasure looking back over the bottles that have brought the most joy, and that have been part of a year where books, music, food and wine have been the thing that the vast majority of us have found essential to our wellbeing.

I should add to the list that the standout books of the year for me have been Hamnett by Maggie O’Farrell and Hilary Mantel’s the Mirror and the Light, the final part of the Wolf Hall trilogy.

Standout music almost entirely things that remind me of absent friends and family, from The Orielles to Dr Hook, and standout food, fully in the 2020 zeitgeist, might just have to be homemade sourdough bread care of my husband.

So, the wines; in a year where I have been centred so much on Bordeaux, I have probably tasted more brilliant older bottles than ever before, almost entirely thanks to online tastings and virtual launches of my Inside Bordeaux book.

As a result I could easily have filled this list with 10 top Bordeaux.

Wines that nearly made it include Le Pin 1999, Cos d’Estournel 1996, Angélus 1998, Léoville Poyferré 1989, Palmer 2009. All were highlights, but the ones that have made it through to the final list are either unanswerably brilliant – step forward Petrus 1998 – or associated with moments that made the year so much better (Mouton Rothschild 2007).

And in a year where there has been so much loss, one bottle is a nod to Denis Durantou, who passed away in May 2020 just as I was tasting through the 2019 en primeur samples that will now be his final vintage.

The rest on my 2020 top 10 list are from California, Spain, Italy and Germany, plus Chablis and the Rhône back in France. They are all from wine regions that I love and can’t wait to revisit.

Here’s to all of us getting to rediscover the joy of easy travelling in the year ahead, and in the meantime here’s to the wines that allows us to get as close as possible to those simple pleasures while remaining at home.

Jane Anson’s top fine wines of 2020: Tasting notes and scores

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