Wines £25 to £50

Gosset blocks malolactic conversion across the range, which is why an Extra Brut here reads precise rather than austere.

A family estate blending several of its own Kimmeridgian parcels rather than buying fruit in, which is rarer at this level of Chablis tha...

Saint-Véran gives the shape of white Burgundy in a more approachable register, and Ferrand makes it without any oak so the fruit and the ...

A single hectare in Meursault, two hundred metres from Puligny-Montrachet, bottled under the humbler Bourgogne Côte d'Or appellation.

Santenay sits at the quiet southern end of the Cote de Beaune and rarely draws the attention its neighbours get.

Saint-Véran borders Pouilly-Fuissé and shares much of its limestone, and Plaisance comes from plots at the foot of the appellation's best slopes.

Rully is where the Cote Chalonnaise makes white Burgundy that tastes like the Cote de Beaune without the Cote de Beaune bill, and Vauvry ...

White Santenay is scarce in a village that mostly makes red, and Clos des Champs Carafe is the highest walled vineyard in it.

Properly mature claret is the hardest thing to buy at this price, and this one arrives with a decade already behind it and no cellaring required.

White Bordeaux made the serious way: one 1.80-hectare plot of clay and limestone, hand-picked at dawn, fermented in barrel with bâtonnage...

Connétable was one of the very first Médoc second wines, and it comes off Talbot's single 110-hectare vineyard rather than bought-in fruit.

Seventeen hectares on the Grand Poujeaux gravel terrace, the same vein that starts at Mouton Rothschild and ends in Margaux, with Hubert ...

The second wine of a Second Growth Saint-Julien, off forty-five-year-old vines on gravel over clay and made the same traditional way as the grand vin.

Goulée is made in the northern Médoc by Cos d'Estournel, the Saint-Estèphe Second Growth, using the same careful, low-temperature approac...

Pomerol on a small scale: a handful of hectares on the plateau's southern slopes, organically farmed and aged on its fine lees without racking.

Twenty-five hectares on the limestone plateau near the high point of Saint-Émilion, in one of the appellation's best communes, reclassifi...

The second wine of a Margaux Third Growth, made from younger vines on the same Cantenac gravel and in the same house style.

Le Secret is the top cuvée at Lestrille, a 45-hectare Entre-deux-Mers estate: parcel-by-parcel vinification, ageing in selected barriques...

A single 30-hectare block at 450 metres in High Eden, one of the Eden Valley's cooler corners, which is why a 14.5% Shiraz blend still sh...

The fruit is drawn deliberately from both warm low-lying sites and cooler high-altitude ones, which is why the wine has layers rather tha...

Single-vineyard Shiraz from the Florita site at Watervale, where thin loam over limestone and a wide day-to-night swing keep the fruit el...

Gingin clone, whole-bunch pressed, wild-fermented in barrel and stirred on lees for nine months with no malolactic conversion: the recipe...

No malolactic conversion and only a fifth new oak, so the barrel adds texture rather than butter and the wine stays taut and citrus-drive...

Mount Langi Ghiran pioneered cool-climate Australian Shiraz, and Mast is the estate's expression of that style in a year too cool for the...