The Hudin Top 100 – 2023 is out now!
Yes, today marks the arrival of our annual collection of the best wines in Spain. If curious what’s been selected in the past, do have a look.
To review, after a very undesired lull in travels for the last couple of years, 2023 saw reviews and coverage back up to normal levels and most importantly, in person. There have been extensive reports on DOQ Priorat, DOC Rioja (twice), all the sparkling wines in Catalunya, the most in depth coverage on DO Ribera del Duero to date, as well as smaller regions like DO Vinos de Madrid and the entire island of Mallorca, as well as many more.
For 2023, we went back and looked at top scorers from the thousands of Spanish wines that were reviewed in order to compile a finite list of those that stood out for a variety of reasons including: representative of region or grape variety, quality for price, ideally being available outside their production region, and of course, how well they scored.
There were some ground rules that had to be into place for this selection with the first being that the wines needed to have a retail price in Spain of around 200€ or less. Why this limit? To us it seemed like the uppermost price someone would pay locally for a very special bottle to enjoy. While consumers in the NYC, SF, London, Hong Kong, Singapore and other well-known wine cities are often willing to pay a good deal more, keep in mind that a 200€ bottle will most definitely be a great deal more once exported to foreign shores.
Thus with this in mind, it immediately chops out a number of very choice wines from Spain such at l’Ermita, Pingus, Mas de la Rosa, Viña el Pisón, and the just-released Turó d’en Mota Enoteca. Choices were indeed made, but in doing so it then allowed exploration of a great number of wines that may not be as well-known but are exceedingly fine.
The final price range for the wines runs from just under 15€ up to 200€.
To show the fine diversity of Spain, the wines colors are: 59% red, 38% white, 2% rosé, and 1% orange as well as 76% still and 24% sparkling.
There was also the need to limit the number of wines from each winery to two at most, otherwise it would have been very easy to include pretty much all of Turó d’en Mota, Álvaro Palacios, López de Heredia, or others as Spain does not lack for tremendous swaths of high-quality wines from its icon wineries.
Please keep in mind that the wines are listed alphabetically by winery name and this does not represent a ranking. In order to view the entire list sorted by scores with access to the full reviews (as well as all the thousands of articles on Hudin.com), one needs to be a paid subscriber. We will however tell you that the #1 wine this year was the Clos Erasmus 2021 as it encapsulates the excellence of this vintage in Spain and especially in DOQ Priorat which has all contributed to this wine having earned 99+ points.
We hope you enjoy this list as it’s always an amazing exercise to be reminded of tasting these wines over the past year and the diverse places they’re from.
