DoctorWine GuidesPot-Pourri

Special Awards 2026

by Editorial Staff
special prizes DoctorWIne 2026
Stampa PDF 🖨

In our intentions, the special awards we give in The Essential Guide to Italian Wines serve to shed light on the state of our viticulture. In fact, we bring under the lens wines, companies, people, and projects that particularly strike us year after year for their quality, capacity, and creativity, and that we want to highlight in order to underscore their propulsive role towards the entire wine movement.

So let’s start with our best wines by category.

Wine awards: red, white, rosé, sparkling, sweet

This year’s Red Wine of the Year is from Trentino, and it is an extremely reliable wine year after year, from the first vintage in 1982 to the present. We therefore crown the Vigneti delle Dolomiti San Leonardo 2020 San Leonardo, a Bordeaux blend of undoubted finesse and elegance, particularly performing well in this vintage. As White Wine of the Year we have chosen a special selection of Sauvignon made by a historic winery in Friuli. It is the Collio Sauvignon Extempore 2022 Venica&Venica, Excellent expression of elegance and poise. The Rosé Wine of the Year is the Lazio Rosato Hèkos Franc 2024 Colle Picchioni, a wine made from Cabernet Franc that manages to combine the usual freshness of rosé wines with unexpected power and complexity.

Also this year, the wine we chose as the Lively Wine of the Year (defined so to avoid hurting the susceptibility of those who, by discipline, do not want to use the generic term “sparkling wine”) will leave quite a few people speechless. It is about the Grave di Stecca 2018 Nino Franco Spumanti, a sparkling wine from Glera grapes produced by the Charmat method. Basically a non-Prosecco, since the producer chose to keep it outside the specification, but undoubtedly the best there is. For the Sweet Wine of the Year we move to Sicily, to Marsala, and pay tribute to one of the greatest historical appellations as well as to the company that most represents it. We have chosen the Marsala Vergine Riserva VR1898 1998 Florio, not a sweet wine really, but a great meditation wine, as Luigi Veronelli would have said.

Wine awards: winning debut, best Quality/Price, widespread quality

As for the award The Winning Debut, dedicated to the wine that comes out on the market for the first time ever and manages to achieve a great result, we opted for the Marche Rosso Il Tolentino 2022 Il Pollenza. A pure Merlot made by winemaker Carlo Ferrini for the Marche winery most reminiscent of a Bordeaux châteaux.

We now come to an award that is very dear to the public, The Wine with the Best Value for Money, which crowns the Basilicata Rosso Carolin Gold Edition 2022 Martino, a fresh, fragrant red from Vulture with an enveloping, full-bodied sip. It reports an excellent tasting score (94/100) and has a decidedly low cost: € 9. We go to Tuscany to find the winner of the Diffuse Quality Award, awarded to a wine that combines high quality with a considerable number of bottles produced, thus allowing easy availability on the market. It is the Chianti Rufina Riserva Nipozzano 2022 Frescobaldi, a wine that is a guarantee, reflecting at the highest level a denomination as important as Chianti, of the vocated Rufina subzone.

Awards to companies

Let’s continue with the other awards and move on to those dedicated to companies.

The award Winery of the Year, for the top-performing winery, goes to Piedmont this year, specifically to Vietti, in Castiglione Falletto, in the heart of the Barolo area, where Vietti has been making wine for well over a century and carries on the definition of individual crus with great ownership. The Emerging Producer, that is, the unknown novelty or that little-known company that is making leaps and bounds, is from Lombardy. It is the Grumello Castle, a splendid estate in the center of the Valcalepio, the hilly strip that stretches between Bergamo and Lake Iseo, which offers a tailored approach to production.

We then have the Cooperation Award, dedicated to social wineries, which sees the affirmation of Vecchia Cantina di Montepulciano, a small Tuscan cooperative winery that has seen a surge in the quality of its wines in recent years and is marking an important point in market segmentation with its Cantina del Redi project.

For the Sustainable Viticulture, an award given to those who are committed to eco-sustainability in the most diverse ways, we have chosen a South Tyrolean company known everywhere for its biodynamic “creed,” a company that has made respect for the natural environment a guide for life as well as work. We are talking about Manincor.

Awards to people

Winemaker of the Year is, for the first time in our short history, a woman. She is Graziana Grassini, consulting winemaker, best known as the winemaker of Sassicaia, but who has far more arrows to her bow.

Recognition A life for wine, which is intended to highlight the role and commitment of a leading player in the Italian wine scene, doubles this year to pay tribute to two prominent figures in the Trentino wine world of the last few decades and who have now emerged from it: Ruben Larentis, for 37 years chef de cave of Ferrari, and Anselmo Martini, production director of the Cavit. Each of them has produced millions of bottles at very high levels. One way to recognize the ability to combine excellence and volume. As a counterbalance to this award, we have established the Next Generation, dedicated to young people making their way in this world with skill, preparation, passion and tenacity. The choice fell on the group Assovini Sicilia’s Generation Next which brings together young people under 40. Young people, indeed, dynamic, with a passion for Sicily and a desire to make the island known and to communicate the wine world in a new language.

The Quality Project, the Most Beautiful Label and Passion Wine Tourism

Moving on, the choice for the Quality Project Award fell on Equalitas, the company established with the aim of promoting sustainability certification in the wine industry that encompasses the three “pillars” of sustainability: environmental, economic and ethical/social. The award dedicated to the Most beautiful label, born to emphasize the great attention that Italian producers pay to labels, both designer labels and those that are the result of a “family” idea, this year flew to Puglia. We wanted to highlight the fine work done by Cantele about his wine Puglia Negroamaro Rosato Rohesia. The label features a design inspired by the word “Rohesia,” which means “rose” in medieval Latin, with a geometric pattern resembling the petals of a rose.

To conclude, a new award, dedicated to hospitality “in the vineyards.” Passion Enotourism, an award to the facilities of the wineries (agritourisms, wine relais, country hotels…) that we have had the opportunity to see and experience over many years of frequenting the producers. So an award based on our years of experience, made up of visits, tastings, discovery of territories and people. For this debut we have chosen Roncade Castle, the only Venetian pre-Palladian walled villa, which represents one of the most spectacular examples of Venetian rural culture and offers the possibility of staying within its walls.

Finally, let us not forget the selection of single-vineyard wines, which we presented to you yesterday. Among them are some of the pillars of our country’s wine quality.

Special awards at a glance

And that’s not all: below is the link to pre-order your copy of The Essential Guide to Italian Wine 2026 and to book yourself at the events presentation events in Milan and Rome:

RELATED ARTICLES

What you think about this post?

Salva il mio nome, l'e-mail e il sito web in questo browser per la prossima volta che commenterò.