# DWWA 2026: The Award-Winning Wines Actually Worth Buying > Source: https://wineguide101.com/dwwa-2026-award-winning-wines-worth-buying/ > Author: Damon Segal > Published: 2026-08-13T21:30:43+00:00 > Modified: 2026-08-13T21:31:24+00:00 Discover 10 standout DWWA 2026 wines, from Best in Show bottles to brilliant supermarket buys, plus how to use wine medals wisely. *The Decanter World Wine Awards 2026 judged 16,631 wines from 58 countries, producing enough medals to make even the most committed wine drinker develop label fatigue. So rather than treating the results like a very boozy spreadsheet, I’ve dug into what the awards actually tell us, where the interesting value lies, and which ten bottles are worth putting on your radar.* ## What do the Decanter World Wine Awards actually tell you? Wine competitions create a peculiar consumer problem. On one hand, an award sticker is reassuring. On the other, walk into a decent wine shop and enough bottles are wearing gold circles to make the shelf look as though everyone received a medal for taking part. The **Decanter World Wine Awards 2026**, however, deserves a bit more attention than most. This year's competition assessed **16,631 wines from 58 countries**, judged in London by 245 wine experts, including 63 Masters of Wine and 24 Master Sommeliers. That's less "Dave from accounts quite liked the Shiraz" and more one of the largest organised blind assessments of wine anywhere in the world. Only **50 wines, around 0.3% of entries, reached Best in Show**. The judging structure is also important. Wines are initially grouped by country, region, grape, vintage and price before being blind tasted. Bronze, Silver and Gold wines emerge from those panels, Gold winners can progress to Platinum, then the Platinum wines are tasted again by the DWWA Co-Chairs to select Best in Show. So a 97-point Best in Show hasn't merely had one enthusiastic judge wave a clipboard at it. It has survived several rounds of people whose palates are considerably better trained than most of ours. And yes, I include mine in that statement. I've completed WSET Level 2 and am currently working through Level 3, which mainly teaches you that every time you think you're beginning to understand wine, someone introduces another soil type. More importantly, I taste wine because I enjoy it, buy wine both to drink and cellar, visit producers when I can and spend quite a lot of time trying to connect what's in the glass with what consumers are actually being asked to pay for it. That last bit matters enormously here. ## Does a DWWA medal mean a wine is good? Broadly, **yes, but it means the wine is good at being what it is supposed to be**. That's a subtle but crucial distinction. DWWA Bronze wines score 86-89 points, Silver 90-94, Gold 95-96 and Platinum or Best in Show 97-100. At the upper levels, judges are looking for complexity, balance, character and a clear sense of place and style. But medals aren't personality tests for wine drinkers. A beautifully judged, high-acid Nebbiolo can win Gold while remaining absolutely the wrong bottle for someone whose idea of a perfect red is plush Californian Cabernet. I've been reminded of this repeatedly at tastings, most recently at a Hundred Acre dinner. Great Californian wine can deliver extraordinary concentration, texture and intensity, but what I particularly enjoy is seeing how that power can still retain balance and precision. It also reinforces something competitions sometimes obscure: **quality and preference are related, but they're not identical**. A score can tell me that experts believe a wine is exceptional. It can't tell me whether you fancy drinking it with dinner on Friday. **Bottom Line:** Use medals to identify quality **inside styles you already enjoy**, then use them to explore one or two steps beyond your usual drinking territory. ## DWWA 2026 shows the wine map is getting much more interesting One of the best things about the 2026 results is how thoroughly they refuse to behave like a traditional atlas of fine wine. The United States achieved its strongest DWWA performance yet with **466 medals**, while Oregon's Domaine Serene Aspect Pinot Noir 2023 collected Best in Show. Washington also performed strongly with Bordeaux and Rhône varieties, while Texas picked up four Gold medals from grapes including Souzão, Tannat and Tempranillo. Yes, Texas. Wine remains one of the few industries where saying "have you tried the Tannat from Texas?" can make you sound either remarkably knowledgeable or as though you've confused two separate conversations. China won **214 medals**, including a Platinum for a high-altitude Cabernet blend from Yunnan, alongside strong results from Ningxia. Then there are the native grapes. Croatia took Best in Show with Plavac Mali from Hvar, while Altesse from Savoie, Saperavi from Xinjiang, Prieto Picudo from Spain and Robola from Greece appeared among the top medal categories. For drinkers, that's arguably more exciting than yet another expensive Cabernet receiving confirmation that it is, indeed, very good. It gives you permission to wander. ## Are supermarket award-winning wines actually worth buying? This is where DWWA gets particularly useful. Asda collected **27 DWWA medals**, including ten Golds, while Tesco Finest's Chianti Classico Riserva 2021, produced by Melini, also picked up a Value Gold. The point isn't that supermarkets have suddenly discovered winemaking. Large retailers have become very good at procurement. Asda's direct sourcing model through International Procurement and Logistics allows it to work closely with producers and influence blends while reducing some of the margins associated with more traditional routes to market. My day job is branding and marketing, and this part of the wine market fascinates me because price and perceived quality have a rather complicated relationship. Wine consumers regularly tell themselves that they aren't influenced by labels, prices and brands, usually while being influenced by labels, prices and brands. A £9 bottle winning 95 points disrupts that mental shortcut. It doesn't mean every supermarket bottle is secretly Château Margaux wearing casual clothes, but it does demonstrate how scale, sourcing and strong buying teams can produce surprisingly serious wine at everyday prices. And that's where Value Gold and Value Platinum become genuinely useful. They identify wines scoring 95 points or above while remaining under roughly £15. For most people, that may be a far more useful shopping signal than Best in Show. ## 10 DWWA 2026 wines worth looking for ### 1. Domaine Serene, Aspect Pinot Noir 2023, Oregon **Best in Show, 97 points | Around £130-£160** A serious Dundee Hills Pinot Noir showing red cherry, sassafras, wild thyme and crushed-stone character, with fine tannins and enough structure for cellaring. This is the prestige option rather than Tuesday-night pasta wine, unless your Tuesdays are considerably more glamorous than mine. ### 2. Deep Woods Estate, Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2023 **Best in Show, 97 points | Around £35-£45** Margaret River Cabernet continues to offer a compelling alternative to the famous Cabernet regions of Bordeaux and Napa. Expect cassis, graphite, bay leaf, herbs and structured tannins. At the quoted price, this looks particularly interesting. ### 3. Rapaura Springs, Rohe Blind River Sauvignon Blanc 2025 **Best in Show, 97 points | Around £18-£22** If Marlborough Sauvignon makes you picture endless supermarket shelves of gooseberries, this could reset things. The Blind River wine brings flinty minerality, herbs, lemongrass and passionfruit together with focused acidity and genuine structure. ### 4. Birgit Eichinger, Ried Lamm 1ÖTW Grüner Veltliner 2024 **Best in Show, 97 points | Around £28-£35** White pepper, stone fruit, gravel and that wonderful combination of richness and acidity that makes good Grüner both fascinating and absurdly food-friendly. One for anyone whose white-wine repertoire needs liberating from Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. ### 5. Domaine De La Clartière, Terres De Paillé 2024 **Value Platinum, 97 points | Around £12-£15** Potentially one of the most interesting buys in the entire list. This Anjou Chenin Blanc offers quince, green apple, wool and stony character with firm acidity and texture. Ninety-seven points for less than £15 is the sort of wine mathematics I can happily support. ### 6. Hoquetus Wine Co., Francisca's Vineyard Syrah 2023 **Gold, 95 points | Around £30-£40** Washington Syrah showing cured meat, pepper, dark plum and olive notes, with fine tannins and freshness. A useful reminder that Syrah's passport contains considerably more stamps than just Rhône and Barossa. ### 7. Exceptional by Asda, Red Zinfandel NV **Gold, 95 points | Around £7-£9** Ripe blackberry, bramble and baking spice with smooth tannins. At this price, the story is less about prestige and more about whether you can get genuine varietal character without spending £20. Apparently, yes. ### 8. Cellier Des Dauphins, Réserve Côtes du Rhône 2025 **Value Gold, 95 points | Around £8.50-£10.50** Grenache and Syrah bringing raspberry, lavender, thyme and pepper, wrapped in soft tannins. This is exactly what awards can be useful for: helping identify reliable, everyday regional wine among a wall of similarly shaped bottles. ### 9. Tesco Finest, Melini Chianti Classico Riserva 2021 **Value Gold, 95 points | Around £9.50-£11.50** Sour cherry, oregano, tobacco and leather, with Sangiovese's characteristic acidity and food-friendly tannins. Given my fondness for Tuscany and having spent time visiting estates there, including Antinori, I'm particularly interested whenever genuinely regional Tuscan character survives the journey into mainstream retail. Good Chianti should taste of Tuscany, not focus groups. ### 10. Exceptional by Asda, Cava Brut NV **Gold, 95 points | Around £8-£10** Traditional-method sparkling wine with citrus, apple and subtle brioche character. For anyone automatically walking from Prosecco to Champagne with nothing in between, Cava continues to stand there quietly wondering what else it has to do to get noticed. ## How should you use wine awards when buying? Don't build your entire wine buying strategy around medals. Use them as filters. When I'm deciding what to buy for my own cellar, I'm looking beyond a score at producer, vintage, drinking window, style, price and whether the wine adds something worthwhile to what I already own. For everyday drinking, the calculation is different. If you know you enjoy Chianti, Rhône blends or Californian Zinfandel, a 95-point bottle below £12 is a very useful clue. If you're trying something completely unfamiliar, the medal reduces some of the risk. That's particularly useful with the emerging regions and lesser-known grapes appearing in these results. You don't have to understand Plavac Mali before buying it. Sometimes curiosity is enough. **Bottom Line:** Buy the wine, not the medal. But when two unfamiliar bottles are staring back at you from the shelf, a respected blind-tasting award is a perfectly sensible tie-breaker. ## What DWWA 2026 really tells us about wine The biggest lesson from the **Decanter World Wine Awards 2026** isn't that there are 50 bottles everyone urgently needs to buy. It's that excellent wine is coming from more places, more grapes and more price points than many consumers realise. There are £150 Oregon Pinots worth cellaring and £9 supermarket reds worth opening tonight. There are increasingly serious wines coming from China, Washington and even Texas, while old native grapes are finding new audiences alongside Cabernet, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. For wine drinkers, that's excellent news. Treat DWWA as a map rather than a league table. Start with the styles you love, use the medals to find particularly strong examples, then occasionally follow one of those gold stickers somewhere you wouldn't normally go. Because discovering that you love a £12 Chenin Blanc from Anjou or a grape you've never managed to pronounce is considerably more fun than simply proving you can buy the bottle with the biggest score. And considerably cheaper.