Two Floors, 250 Wines and a $400 Ticket: Inside the New York Wine Experience

There is a particular sound a ballroom makes when a thousand people are tasting wine at once — a low, happy roar punctuated by the clink of glass on spit bucket. On Thursday and Friday night it filled two full floors of the New York Marriott Marquis, where Wine Spectator's New York Wine Experience returned for its 45th edition. It is the biggest fine-wine gathering in the country, and for two evenings a year Times Square's least glamorous hotel becomes the most interesting room in the city.

This is not a street fair with a wristband

Let's be clear about what kind of event this is. General admission to a single night's Grand Tasting runs about $400. The full weekend package — both tastings with VIP early entry, two days of seated seminars, two wine luncheons and the closing Champagne reception — is $2,995, and it sold out months ago. The dress code says "business attire" and the room takes it seriously: blazers, cocktail dresses, the occasional velvet jacket. The crowd is collectors, sommeliers, restaurateurs, importers and the kind of enthusiast who keeps a cellar spreadsheet. If the city's summer wine festivals are for people who like wine, this is for people who are serious about it — and the price is the velvet rope.

What you get for it is, in fairness, extraordinary. The Critics' Choice Grand Tasting puts more than 250 wines on the floor, every one rated 90 points or higher by the magazine's editors, poured by the people who made them. Not brand ambassadors — the winemakers and owners themselves, flown in from Napa, Bordeaux, Piedmont, Rioja, the Douro and the Barossa, standing behind their own table for the better part of four hours answering the same question ("what should I taste?") with undimmed enthusiasm.

Friday night on the sixth floor

We were there Friday. VIP doors open at six; the big room is the Broadway Ballroom on the sixth floor, with the overflow upstairs in the Westside, and the first thing you see is the tasting map — a wall-sized grid of table numbers and château names that looks like the seating chart for the most expensive wedding in history. The second thing you see is the glassware: thousands of stems laid out in ranks on black trays, waiting.

Then the room fills. Under the Marquis's rings of chandeliers and a violet wash of stage lighting, the floor becomes a slow, polite stampede. The strategy, veterans will tell you, is to go against the current. The famous names — the first growths, the cult Napa Cabernets — draw lines that snake across the carpet the moment doors open. The smart money starts at the far end, works through the Spanish, Portuguese and Italian tables while they're quiet, and circles back to the trophies after nine, when the crowd has thinned and the pourers are feeling generous.

Our own detour paid off at the Port tables, which were nearly deserted at seven and mobbed by nine. Quinta do Noval was pouring its 2022 Vintage; Ramos Pinto had a 30-year tawny the color of old brass; and Dow's had opened the 1994 Vintage Port — a legendary year, a wine most people will only ever read about, poured into a tasting glass as casually as house red. That, in one bottle, is the argument for the ticket price.

Every bottle on every table is donated by the winery. That matters, because the event exists to raise money: all net proceeds go to the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation, which has put more than $30 million into scholarships and grants for people building careers in wine and hospitality since the event began in 1981 — in its first year at Windows on the World, atop the World Trade Center. Last year's edition drew more than 4,000 attendees across the weekend.

The weekend the package buys

Friday's seminar program opened with sixth-generation Bollinger family member Cyril Delarue on Pinot Noir in Champagne, then moved through Véronique Drouhin's Oregon and Burgundy wines, a vertical from Châteauneuf-du-Pape's Isabel Ferrando, and an old-vine Zinfandel session with Turley, Ridge and Bedrock. The day closed with grower Andy Beckstoffer and three winemakers who source from his legendary To Kalon vineyard.

Saturday is the showstopper. Carla Bruni presents the Provence rosé from Château d'Estoublon. Four Rioja houses each pour a wine from a different decade for "70 Years of Rioja." Thomas Duroux walks a room through Château Palmer back to the 2005. Penfolds chief winemaker Peter Gago pours four vintages of Grange, among them the 100-point 2008. And the crowd-favorite Chefs' Challenge — a food-and-wine pairing showdown — pits Emeril Lagasse against three New York heavyweights: Danny Meyer, Andrew Carmellini and Charlie Palmer.

Threaded through both days is the tradition that gives the weekend its spine: a tasting of Wine Spectator's Top 10 Wines of 2025, counted down across the seminars with each producer in the room, building to the 2025 Wine of the Year — Château Giscours Margaux 2022, a 95-point third growth that, at $68, was the rare Wine of the Year a normal person could actually buy.

How it ends

Saturday night the weekend closes the way a New York weekend should: a Champagne reception with small plates from the city's Wine Spectator Restaurant Award winners, top sparkling wines, and a side table of whiskies courtesy of sister magazine Whisky Advocate. By then the people who did the whole package have tasted several hundred wines in 72 hours, and the ones still standing look remarkably cheerful about it.

• If you want to go next year: tickets go on sale in the spring and the weekend package goes first. Grand Tasting tickets last longer, but rarely to October.
• Buy the VIP hour. The $100 premium buys ninety minutes of the famous tables with no line. It is the best money you'll spend all night.
• Dress: jackets and dresses. Comfortable shoes are the only rule that matters — you will be on your feet for four hours on carpet.
• Eat first, and spit. Everyone who looks like they know what they're doing is doing both.

For two nights a year, the most interesting room in New York is a hotel ballroom in Times Square — and everyone in it paid four hundred dollars to hold the glass.

The New York Wine Experience ran October 22–24, 2026, at the New York Marriott Marquis, 1535 Broadway. Wine Spectator's Top 10 Wines of 2026 will be unveiled starting November 9, with the full Top 100 on November 16.