Wines of Navarra recently asked you, the country’s top wine professionals, to make a case for some free wine, and maybe win a trip to the region. Here are the top 10 entries

Rioja, Ribera del Duero and Priorat all make much of their aristocratic roots. Clinton Cawood joins a team of tannin-hardened sommeliers to put their top wines to the test and find out which region has the strongest claim to the Spanish throne

Food Match Awards

In the past, a By The Glass award has gone to wines that match specific dishes – the theory being that they could be served by the glass as ready matches with a meal.

While the kick-out rate was high, the wines left at the end served as a blunt reminder to sub-standard also-rans of just how good the pink stuff can be

A broad selection of decent, well-made wines, but far fewer for our tasters to get really excited about

With screwcaps to the fore, the quality of the whites (particularly) and the reds here was amazing for the price. Rosé was another matter entirely

A somewhat muted performance after the high medal count of last year, with the much-vaunted Galicia, in particular, something of a disappointment in 2011

Over 1,500 wines can be boiled down to this: the hallowed Sommelier Wine Awards Gold List for 2011...

Some great-value wines on the Gold List together with a few top-end ones, too. With more controlled oak use, in future years this is a category that could really fly

The Sommelier Wine Awards doesn’t give out trophies per category because we’re worried that tasters will feel under pressure to dispense extra awards in categories where they may not believe the wines are up to it. Instead, in keeping with the whole ethos of the competition, we leave the judgement up to the sommeliers…

Many comments have been made about Spain’s new premium single-estate Pago wines. Could they be the country’s answer to grand cru, or are they mere marketing hype to fleece the unwary? Sarah McCleery puts Spain’s hot properties under the spotlight

Not much wrong in Rioja these days on this evidence, though there wasn’t much there to actively excite our tasters either – and price was something of an issue