The “Most Listed” Wines? An introduction to Star Wine Lists
Imagine you hit it big in crypto or some other hopefully legit pathway to massive disposable income and you want to build a wine collection from scratch beginning with the best of the best. Wouldn't it be helpful to know someone had already determined the 100 global producers whose wines appear most often on the world's best restaurant wine lists?
Or maybe you don't want to deal with all that inventory, you just want to know what to order when you're dining out and money is no object? You'll often hear it said that you can't go wrong if you "buy the producer first." In other words, don't worry about scores or vintages and just choose those producers' whose wines have already earned their international reputations (and prices!) by garnering decades of critical acclaim. Keeping a list of the Top 100 handy would be the closest thing to a quality guarantee you could hope for. After all, if such a list existed, the world's best wine critics and sommeliers would have already done the hard work for you.
Does this seem like an idle fantasy? Well, maybe the money part does. But the Top 100 ranking is very real. A few weeks ago, a quirky Scandinavian website called Star Wine List published its findings about the Top 100 producers whose wines show up most often in their database of more than 2500 leading restaurants and wine bars around the world. It's like a Who's Who of what's on the world's best restaurant wine lists, based on the frequency they appear as opposed to sales.
What is Star Wine List?
Before diving into their rankings, you might well ask what the heck is Star Wine List? In Hollywood, we might say Star Wine List is wine-searcher.com meets Michelin. Wine-searcher.com, of course, is the indispensable guide to the availability and prices of inventory at thousands of global wine retailers, searchable with a few clicks. It includes, where available, critical ratings and a massive amount of valuable content. I use it more than any other wine-related website, almost daily. Michelin Guides needs no introduction, but for our purposes here we mean its focus on the world's best restaurants. The Star Wine List mash-up? A searchable database of what's on great wine lists around the world, studded with market-level guides of the best wine bars and restaurants from a sommelier's perspective.
This last point is critical-Star Wine List at least today appears to maintain a B2B focus, that is, its visitors and paying customers are wine professionals and the high-end producers who court them. In fact, global access to the searchable database of wines by restaurant is behind an annual subscription paywall of more than $1000/year, with an express target of the trade: producers, importers, distributors and the like who use it to identify gaps and for competitive intelligence. To cement the idea, Star Wine List generates its own sponsored awards for best restaurant wine lists in multiple countries and categories, presented with as much PR fanfare as they can muster. The net effect is to treat sommeliers like celebrities, and even if no one else is really paying attention, why shouldn't they have a forum to express the pinnacle of achievement in their profession?
Star Wine List Market Guides
With that said, the market-by-market wine and restaurant guides on the site are excellent and free (and hopefully will stay this way). To date, most of the coverage is outside the US, which makes it invaluable if good wine is on your itinerary when traveling overseas. Who wouldn't benefit from a carefully curated guide to Top 25 Wine Restaurants and Bars in Toronto? Or 12 Great Wine Restaurants in Madrid? You get the idea, and there are approximately 400 of these available as of March '24, although some overlap. Each comes with a detailed map and every venue gets its own succinct write-up from a local expert (termed an "ambassador.") Below is a screenshot of a typical map with the restaurant review in the right margin. I chose Milan because a wine-loving friend just returned from there and I wish I had told him about this resource first.
Or maybe you are going to be in Paris for the Olympics this year. If so, Star Wine List has six different guides to choose from, so no need to drink mediocre, tourist trap bistro wines.
Honestly, along with my American Express Card, if I were in Europe (or Singapore etc, etc), this is so freaking helpful I wouldn't leave home without it.
The Top 100 Producers
But back to the original subject. The ever-expanding Star Wine List restaurant database gives it access to a wealth of information that simply doesn't exist anywhere else, ripe for mining newsworthy insights like the "Top 100 Most Listed Restaurant Wines." Unfortunately, the title is a bit misleading, since it's a list of producers, not individual labels. This makes sense when you consider that it's impossible that the exact same wine would be available worldwide, that most of the producers make more than one wine, and that there's a new vintage every year. Also, by definition, the list reflects the quantity of wine each property generates. Said another way, a prestige Champagne house might produce 10x the annual number of cases of a revered Burgundy winemaker, and thus inevitably it would be nearer the top simply because there's more of it to go around. It does not mean, for example, that Dom Pérignon (#1) makes better wine than Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (#20) or Domaine Armand Rousseau of Burgundy (#88)! Nevertheless, what follows is as close to a pedigreed quality guarantee as the industry has to offer.
Given the caliber of the participating restaurants, you're effectively being presented with a directory of the world's best producers. Their wines are (1) at the very pinnacle of international critical renown (2) for the most part very expensive and hard to source, and (3) at the core of active auction and other secondary markets worldwide. Here is the list. Let the drinking, collecting (and the arguments) commence:
1. Dom Pérignon, Champagne, France
2. Louis Roederer, Champagne, France
3. Krug, Champagne, France
4. Gaja, Piedmont, Italy
5. Bollinger, Champagne, France
6. Billecart-Salmon, Champagne, France
7. Tenuta dell’Ornellaia, Tuscany, Italy
8. Tenuta San Guido - Sassicaia, Tuscany, Italy
9. Château d'Yquem, Bordeaux, France
10. Bodegas Vega Sicilia, Ribera del Duero, Spain
11. E. Guigal, Rhône, France
12. Domaine Leflaive, Bourgogne, France
13. Château Latour, Bordeaux, France
14. Maison Ruinart, Champagne, France
15. Château de Beaucastel, Rhône, France
16. Château Haut-Brion, Bordeaux, France
17. Château Margaux, Bordeaux, France
18. Château Mouton Rothschild, Bordeaux, France
19. Château Palmer, Bordeaux, France
20. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC), Bourgogne, France
21. Château Cos D'Estournel, Bordeaux, France
22. Pol Roger, Champagne, France
23. Domaine Jean-Louis Chave, Rhône, France
24. Taittinger, Champagne, France
25. Château Lynch-Bages, Bordeaux, France
26. M. Chapoutier, Rhône, France
27. Château Montrose, Bordeaux, France
28. Opus One, Napa Valley, USA
29. Château Pontet Canet, Bordeaux, France
30. Château Lafite Rothschild, Bordeaux, France
31. Vietti, Piedmont, Italy
32. Penfolds, South Australia, Australia
33. Egly-Ouriet, Champagne, France
34. Château Cheval Blanc, Bordeaux, France
35. R. Lopez de Heredia (Tondonia), Rioja, Spain
36. Laurent-Perrier, Champagne, France
37. Weingut Egon Müller - Scharzhof, Mosel, Germany
38. Domaine Bouchard Père & Fils, Bourgogne, France
39. Veuve Clicquot, Champagne, France
40. Domaine Tempier, Bandol, France
41. Domaine Huet, Vouvray, France
42. Domaine Méo-Camuzet, Bourgogne, France
43. Château Léoville-Las Cases, Bordeaux, France
44. Didier Dagueneau, Pouilly-Fumé, France
45. Domaine de Montille, Bourgogne, France
46. Louis Jadot, Bourgogne, France
47. Domaine Dujac, Bourgogne, France
48. Domaine Faiveley, Bourgogne, France
49. Domaine André & Mireille Tissot, Jura, France
50. Foradori, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy
51. Domaine Zind-Humbrecht, Alsace, France
52. Tenuta Biondi-Santi, Tuscany, Italy
53. Domaine Roulot, Bourgogne, France
54. Dominio de Pingus, Ribera del Duero, Spain
55. Jacques Selosse, Champagne, France
56. Jean Francois Ganevat, Jura, France
57. Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey, Bourgogne, France
58. Kistler Vineyards, California, USA
59. Roagna, Piedmont, Italy
60. Charles Heidsieck, Champagne, France
61. Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, Bordeaux, France
62. Agrapart & Fils, Champagne, France
63. Domaine des Comtes Lafon, Bourgogne, France
64. Emidio Pepe, Abruzzo, Italy
65. Bruno Giacosa, Piedmont, Italy
66. Domaine René et Vincent Dauvissat, Chablis, France
67. Pétrus, Bordeaux, France
68. Joseph Drouhin, Bourgogne, France
69. Jacquesson, Champagne, France
70. Domaine Francois Raveneau, Chablis, France
71. Giacomo Conterno, Piedmont, Italy
72. Guiseppe Quintarelli, Veneto, Italy
73. Moët & Chandon, Champagne, France
74. Paul Jaboulet Aîné, Rhône, France
75. Niepoort, Portugal
76. Château Léoville Barton, Bordeaux, France
77. Domaine Auguste Clape, Rhône, France
78. Weingut Keller, Rheinhessen, Germany
79. Château Musar, Bekaa Valley, Lebanon
80. Salon, Champagne, France
81. Weingut H. Dönnhoff, Nahe, Germany
82. Domaine Ponsot, Bourgogne, France
83. Domaine Vincent Girardin, Bourgogne, France
84. Dominus Estate, Napa Valley, USA
85. Château Léoville-Poyferré, Bordeaux, France
86. Weingut Emmerich Knoll, Niederösterreich, Austria
87. Château La Mission Haut-Brion, Bordeaux, France
88. Domaine Armand Rousseau, Bourgogne, France
89. Domaine Weinbach, Alsace, France
90. Domaine Ramonet, Bourgogne, France
91. Domaine Marquis D ́Angerville, Bourgogne, France
92. Domaine Guiberteau, Saumur, France
93. Domaine Vacheron, Sancerre, France
94. Château Calon Ségur, Bordeaux, France
95. Larmandier-Bernier, Champagne, France
96. Château Gruaud Larose, Bordeaux, France
97. Château Pichon Lalande, Bordeaux, France
98. G.D. Vajra, Piedmont, Italy
99. Weingut Dr. Loosen, Mosel, Germany
100. Domaine Jean Foillard, Beaujolais, France
