Chardonnay

Barrel-fermented Chardonnay aged on its lees in new 500-litre oak usually comes from much further north and costs a good deal more.

Blended exclusively from reserve wines, which is unusual and gives maturity and toast without losing the house's citrus freshness.

Abelé 1757 is the fifth oldest house in Champagne and keeps production deliberately tiny, so this cuvée rarely travels far.

Löwengang was the first Alto Adige white to establish itself on the international market, and it remains the wine that defines the estate.

Made by the addition method with 15% still Pinot Noir, which gives real red-fruit flavour rather than colour alone.

Palmer & Co only makes this cuvée in a vintage it rates highly, and every grape comes from Premier and Grand Cru vineyards in the Montagne de Reims.

A grower Champagne from a single Premier Cru village, farmed organically and ploughed by horse, at the price the large houses ask for a b...

Aged three times longer than the appellation requires, which buys the fine, persistent mousse and the depth the price suggests.

The benchmark cuvée from the oldest wine house in Champagne, and the clearest statement of the no-malolactic house style: rich and volumi...

Vosgros sits in a sun-trap amphitheatre on the left bank, which is why it gives a rounder, riper Chablis than most Premier Crus.

Mont Pelé is a named single vineyard rather than a blended Mâcon, and six generations of Lenoir know how to read it.

Montmains is the Premier Cru for anyone who wants tension rather than weight, and Labille leaves it almost entirely unoaked, letting 15 t...

A family grower house working eleven hectares of chalk, with three years on the lees — well beyond the minimum — behind a Pinot-led blend.

Seven years in the chalk cellars is well beyond what most vintage Champagne is given, and it shows in the gingerbread and brioche depth s...

Enseignères sits immediately below Bâtard-Montrachet and Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet, about as good an address as a village Puligny can claim.

Pouilly-Fuissé is the Mâconnais at its most serious, and Lise Marie is made without any oak so the site rather than the barrel sets the tone.

Les Clos is the benchmark Chablis Grand Cru, and Fèvre farms 4.11 hectares of it — sixteen per cent of the appellation — on the sunniest upper slopes.

Goulley went organic in 1991, among the very first in Chablis to do so, and still farms every hectare that way with minimal sulphur.

One of the last independent family houses in Champagne, and the reserve-heavy blend shows it: 40% reserve wine drawn across roughly 15 crus.

La Pièce sous le Bois is Meursault's highest and coolest Premier Cru, which is exactly why it holds its acidity in a hot year like 2022.

Vaudésir is the most amphitheatre-like of the Chablis Grand Crus, and Fèvre's steep, fully south-facing 1.2 hectares give it energy rathe...

A grower's Chablis made entirely without oak, so what reaches the glass is Kimmeridgian limestone and citrus rather than barrel.

En Remilly shares a boundary and much of its stony soil with Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet, and makes wine in the same idio...

A Chablis house that built its name buying back Premier and Grand Cru land, applying the same gravity handling and steel ageing to its village wine.