The World's 100 Best Natural Wines

Ranking wine is always an impossible project. A wine is a vintage, a bottle, an occasion — and natural wine more than any other varies from bottling to bottling. Yet some wines matter more than others. Wines that changed how people think about what wine can be.

This list is our curation of a hundred such bottles. The criteria are not scores or price but significance: did the wine move something? Overnoy's Savagnin proved that wine without sulphur can age for decades. Gravner's Ribolla Gialla in amphora effectively created modern orange wine. Allemand's Cornas proved that natural wine can reach classical greatness.

The distribution reflects natural wine's centres of gravity. France dominates with seventy wines, with the Jura, Beaujolais, Loire and Rhône at the core. Italy follows with eighteen, above all Friuli and Etna. Georgia, Austria, Slovenia, Spain and Germany are represented. Forty-two red, thirty white, eleven orange, eleven champagne, four sparkling and two rosé.

We have deliberately left out conventional prestige wines regardless of quality, and every wine whose existence and cuvée name we could not verify. A fabricated cuvée name damages a list more than an omitted bottle.

Six of the wines come from Languedoc and Roussillon — the region we import from ourselves. That says something about how far southern France has come from its reputation as a volume producer.