Volcanic Wine Awards 2026
Celebrating distinctive wines from volcanic terroirs
If you’re a wine producer or distributor interested in submitting wines, please do so through our submissions portal. Note that only wines from volcanic terroirs will be accepted. The competition will be held in New York City and submissions are open until 31 December 2025. If your wine is landed in the US and can be shipped from a US address, then we can extend the submissions deadline into January; we will need to receive your samples by January 29, 2026, (so we can no longer accept submissions that need to be shipped into the US).
About the awards
We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Volcanic Wines International to support and produce the Volcanic Wine Awards for 2026. The Volcanic Wine Awards is the only international wine...
Explore volcanic wines on this site
This is the first of two riveting articles based on Walter's original researches on the less familiar flanks of Sicily's famous volcano. See also Historic Etna part 2 – the south and historic west and associated tasting notes . For...
24 August 2017 We're republishing this article from 2009, in our Throwback Thursday series, as a tribute to the hugely talented Haridimos Hatzidakis who so tragically took his own life recently. He had been troubled for some time, and leaves...
See Etna – winemakers' honeypot for my introduction to this tasting. Contrade dell’Etna, the annual presentation of embryonic Etna wines, is becoming less of an en primeur event. While in previous years producers used to pour cask samples of wines...
See my tasting notes f rom this year's Contrade dell'Etna. Last April the ninth edition of the hugely popular Contrade dell’Etna took place in Passopisciaro (see here for Jancis’s inaugural report on the first edition). Originally the brainchild of Andrea...
Do wines produced from vines grown on volcanic soils have any shared characteristics? Finding a tentative answer to this question was the purpose of a tasting organised by the Institute of Masters of Wine in London last month. The event...
Sicily’s Etna is regularly described as the ‘Burgundy of the south’, which I take as a reference to its parcellated, high-density vineyards rather than to its wine style. Some of the pale, fragrant reds currently being made on Europe’s largest...
Brand new MW Yiannis Karakasis (right) and Grigoris Michailos (left), aka the Wine Commanders, are founders of the independent wine blog winecommanders.com. Both are Diploma holders and WSET educators. Since 2013 Yiannis and Grigoris have joined hands to communicate their...
Last week I was given probably the rarest wine I will ever have the chance to taste. It was only five years old but there are only three – correction, two – bottles in existence. Santorini producers Gaia decided they...
This article is also published in the Financial Times . See also my detailed tasting notes. Italy has no shortage of official wine territories – 575 at the last count – but there is one that has recently been exciting...
Amid the doom and gloom surrounding Italy’s 2014 grape harvest, there is one wine region where growers are extremely pleased with their 2014 vintage – Etna in eastern Sicily, whose small districts, named after important wine villages, are called contrade...
Italy’s fondness for en primeur tastings continues unabated (see, for example, Chianti Classico, Brunello di Montalcino, Nebbiolo Prima, etc, etc). While many are lavish affairs showcasing a huge number of bottles of the latest vintage of a given wine region...
This is a longer version of an article also published in the Financial Times. See my Exotica from the Canary Islands tasting notes. Question: Where are the highest vineyards in Europe? Switzerland, eat your heart out. In fact, they are...