One of my embarrassing personal secrets has always been that I have a lousy memory for what I drink. People often ask me, have you had this or that wine, and quite often my answer involves fumbling for my mobile phone in an attempt to search my own website to answer the question. Half the reason I have my blog in the first place derives from my desire to perform just such an operation, since paging through several years’ worth of Moleskine notebooks hardly provides a practical way to answer such a query. I write things down, or more often, type them, because my brain isn’t particularly good at holding on to them.

In contemplating this column to conclude the year with the best American wines that passed my lips, please imagine me, arms behind my head, reclined on a comfortable chair in front of the fire, lost in the reverie of the many flavours of 2012. Such a scene better captures the emotional intent of this column, even if it diverges wildly from the boring reality of creating pivot tables in Excel capable of telling me the American wines to which I gave the highest scores in the past 12 months.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com.

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is available only to subscribers of her web site. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £6.99 a month or £69 per year ($11/mo or $109 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.