This is the third cut of the same question. Wineries on the Rise looked at individual producers. Regions on the Rise looked at appellations. This piece looks at the grapes themselves: which varieties' cross-regional prestige average has moved most between their pre-2015 vintages and their 2018-onwards releases.
The grape-level cut is interesting because it factors out the producer and the region. A climbing winery might be climbing because of a winemaker change. A climbing region might be climbing because of climate, replanting, or critic recalibration. A climbing grape — averaged across every producer and every region that bottles it — is climbing because the variety itself is being expressed differently in the modern decade.
How we measure a grape climbing
We take every wine in our index, look at which grape varieties it's made from, and attribute each prestige-critic rating on that wine to every constituent variety. A Sangiovese-Cabernet blend's score counts toward both Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon. We then split each grape's ratings by the growing-season year of the vintage. Ratings on 2018-or-later vintages go in the recent column. Ratings on 2014-or-earlier vintages go in the baseline column.
A grape only qualifies if it has at least 100 prestige-critic ratings in each window. This is the highest sample bar of the three uplift pieces — much higher than the winery (5 per window) and region (30 per window) thresholds. Grapes pool across thousands of bottles, hundreds of producers, dozens of regions; the sample requirement has to scale accordingly to keep the comparison meaningful. With this bar, the minor varieties — single-region grapes like Mencía or Furmint — drop out of the eligible set, and what remains is the international and significant-regional cohort.
We then compare each grape's recent average to its baseline average and call the difference its climb. A grape needs a climb of at least +1.0 points to make the list. Lower than the winery threshold (+2.0) and lower than the region threshold (+1.5), for the same statistical reason: grape-level samples pool the most variance and average toward the mean fastest. +1.0 across thousands of ratings is a strong structural signal at this granularity.
For each climbing grape, we also surface the region where its recent average is highest. A climbing grape whose top recent region is its variety's historical home is a different story from a climbing grape whose top recent region is not — the second case is the variety spreading, with the new regions out-scoring the original.
Grapes are ranked by their climb, largest first, with the recent average as the tiebreaker.
Why a grape's climb is a different story
A producer's climb is about people. A region's climb is about climate and capital. A grape's climb is about style — how vintners across the wine world are choosing to express the variety in the modern decade.
Four candidates explain almost every climb on this list:
Phenolic management catching up to ripeness. The grapes that have climbed most aggressively tend to be the varieties whose pre-2015 bottlings were widely criticized for over-ripeness, over-extraction, or both — and whose modern incarnations have been deliberately pulled back. Lower-alcohol Zinfandel, less-oaked Chardonnay, less-extracted Bordeaux varieties. The grapes themselves haven't changed; the winemaking around them has converged on a new consensus that critics happen to score higher.
Cool-climate ripening curves. Varieties historically grown in marginal climates — Pinot Noir on the cool edges, Riesling almost everywhere, Cabernet Franc in the Loire — have had their natural ripeness floor lifted by warmer growing seasons. The fruit-acid-alcohol balance that prestige critics reward is now achievable in places where it used to require an outlier vintage. The climb in these varieties tends to overlap geographically with the climbing-regions list.
New regional homes. A grape that's spreading — Syrah outside the Rhône, Tempranillo outside Rioja, Chenin Blanc outside the Loire — picks up ratings from new prestige producers in new regions. The cross-regional average climbs because the new regions are bottling the variety more seriously than the original region's middle tier. The top-recent-region field is the simplest way to see this: if a climbing grape's top recent region is not the variety's historical home, the climb is being driven by the spread.
Critic varietal preferences shifting. Less interesting but real. Critics' palates change. A generation of reviewers raised on Bordeaux Cabernet may give way to a generation raised on Italian Sangiovese or northern Rhône Syrah, and the scoring drift follows. Hard to disentangle from the structural-quality signals — but looking at whether all five critics agree a grape has climbed, or whether a single critic is carrying it, separates the two cleanly.
The grapes on the list will reflect some mix of all four. The pattern across the list — which colours dominate, whether single-region grapes punch above international varieties, whether the climbing grapes share growing-cycle characteristics — is the meta-signal.
What the list tends to reveal
Three patterns worth watching every time the snapshot is fresh.
International varieties move slowest. Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, and Syrah have the largest samples in the prestige database — easily over 10,000 ratings each per window — and their averages are accordingly the most stable. They tend to register modest +1.0 to +1.5 climbs at best. When an international variety appears high on the list, it's a stronger signal than the same number on a smaller-sample variety: the law of large numbers should be smoothing the move out, and yet it shows.
Cool-climate whites overweight. The most aggressive climbers tend to be cool-climate whites — Riesling, Chenin Blanc, Grüner Veltliner, the cool edges of Chardonnay's expression. The same vintage-cohort story we covered in Regions on the Rise and Mosel Riesling weather and vintages: warmer northern-hemisphere growing seasons giving these grapes the ripeness floor they've historically lacked, without disrupting the acid backbone critics actually reward. The combined effect is bigger at the grape level than at the region level, because it pools across multiple climbing regions.
Italian reds split. Sangiovese and Nebbiolo behave very differently in this analysis — one of them is usually on the climbers list and the other is usually around flat. Which one is climbing in any given snapshot is worth checking against our Barolo vs. Brunello piece for context. The structural reason: the two grapes have very different baseline distributions in our data, so a +1.0 climb means something different for each.
Where to read further
The trilogy of climb pieces is intentionally parallel. The same five prestige critics, the same two vintage windows, three different lenses. Read together, they answer something no single-level analysis can: which is moving — the producer, the place, or the grape?
Most real trends move all three at once. A producer climbs because of a winemaker change; the new winemaker is in the region because the region is climbing; the region is climbing because the dominant grape there is climbing. The interesting cases are the ones where the granularities diverge — a climbing grape whose top regions aren't on the climbing-regions list, or a climbing region whose top producers aren't on the climbing-producers list. Those divergences are where the structural story is.
For more variety-specific deep cuts, see What Is Sangiovese and Pinot Noir, Three Accents. For the producer-level question that started this trilogy, see Wineries on the Rise. For the regional cut, see Regions on the Rise.
