The team at The Wine Advocate, spearheaded by Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW, published its latest report on the Napa Valley 2018 vintage last Friday, adding 193 tasting notes. Scores for Napa Valley 2018 now spans over 1,000 wines in total; 13 of which have achieved the perfect mark.
The United States has taken 8.1% of trade by value year-to-date, a large jump from where it was in 2019 – 2.3% of trade value.
The 2018 releases have caught the attention of the secondary market, and the vintage leads trade by value for the region so far in 2021.
American wines have always had a global audience, in part thanks to the Judgement of Paris in 1976 but they have not always had global distribution. The Rothschild and Mondavi collaboration, Opus One, was the first to go global when it joined La Place de Bordeaux in 2004.
No other US wines joined La Place until Verite in 2016 however. Inglenook then joined in 2018 and Joseph Phelps in 2019.
Better distribution is not the sole reason for the current success of American wines though. As the global awareness of US wine increased, so its domestic popularity has risen too.
The number of distinct US wines bought by US buyers increased 12-fold in 2020, with sales of those US wines split among all major regions.
There are currently over £330k of LIVE offers for the 2018 vintage, the largest single vintage share of the £1.9m in LIVE offers for the United States.
