Wines £25 to £50

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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...