Fifty Wines That Shaped My Palate: 1984-2014

A reprise, with annotations.

I started this post as a way of commemorating my 30th anniversary in wine-writing, reached, as My Regular Readers know -- bless your little pointy heads and may your tribes increase -- early in July. Initially, the concept was "Fifty Great Wines," but I decided that choosing 50 "great" wines from 30 years of tasting would be an impossible and probably just stupid and futile task. In three decades, I tasted thousands and thousands and more thousands of wines -- you writers know how it is -- so choosing the 50 "greatest" from this immense group would be a Sisyphean exercise.