Alternative to query_posts?

I was wondering if there was any way to make my code more efficient? In the example below I'm using query_posts to pull a list of all posts with a post type of "press" and then sorting them into lists by year of publication date. It feels quite resource-heavy though as the page load time is on the long side.

<section id="press-archive">
    <ul>
    	<?php
    	query_posts('posts_per_page=-1&post_type=press&order=desc&orderby=meta_value_num&meta_key=wpcf-publication-date');
        $current_year = '';
        while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
        	global $post;
        	$this_year = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'wpcf-publication-date', true );
        	$this_year = date('Y', $this_year);
        	if (($this_year != $current_year)) :
        		if ($current_year != '')
                    echo '</ul>' . "n";
        			echo '</li>' . "n";
        			echo '<li class="year">' . "n";
        			echo '<h2 class="header">' . $this_year . '</h2>' . "n";
                    echo '<ul>' . "n";
        			$current_year = $this_year;
        		endif;
        		echo '<li id="' . $this_year . '">' . "n";
                ?>
                    <span class="source"><?php echo(types_render_field("source", array())); ?></a> &mdash; <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> <span class="publication-date">(<?php echo(types_render_field("publication-date", array("format" => "jS F"))); ?>)</span>
                </li>    		
        <?php
        endwhile;
        if ($current_year != '') echo '</li>' . "n";
        wp_reset_postdata();
        ?>
    </ul>
</section>

Any help on making this less resource-heavy would be fantastic. Thank you.