St Emilion

A Lay & Wheeler favourite for years, what's not to love about this St-Emilion, part of the Durantou family of wines. Silky and fine, with loads of savoury tannins, and long and pure finish. Buy this in bottles, and magnums, and make sure you've always got both to hand over the years to come.

Tasted April 2022. Delicious and aromatic, this 2021 is full of soft red and black berry fruits, kirsch, mulberry and damson. Cashmere texture, fine, ripe tannins and bright acidity. There's great concentration here and a savoury, mineral finish. Fantastic value as ever. 13.5%.

This St-Emilion is one of our go-to wines, for sheer quality and value for money. The final vintage overseen by Denis Durantou, this is a wine to buy by the case.

Lovely intensity and power. There's so much depth and concentration here, spanning floral notes to deep dark fruits, bound up with lovely tension and elegance. This is beautiful. The finish is nicely balanced with a cool, saline finish and more spice and flowers. Quite brilliant.

Tasted April 2022. An unusual blend this year with 75% Cabernet Franc and 25% Cabernet Sauvignon. This is medium-bodied, full of fresh red berry fruit and crushed stone, mineral notes, petals and mint. There's some spicy, richer notes developing, and plenty of fresh acidity.

Tasted April 2022. This is the first vintage for Joséphine Duffau-Lagarrosse and it's a stellar effort and one of our favourite wines of the vintage. It's ripe but incredibly elegant with loads of crushed rock, mineral, almost salty elements to it. Slight herbal notes at the start and end on the palate but in good balance with the other ripe flavours, coming across as an almost minty freshness. Tiny volumes made, this is really one to watch.

Tasted April 2022. Cascading fresh red and black berry fruit, with a distinct aroma of fresh raspberries. More lifted aromas of mint make this really delicious and fresh. There's a lovely soft fruit middle giving a velvet texture on the palate, and there's balanced fresh acidity and very fine tannins.

Tasted April 2022. The best wine we've tasted from Berliquet, the 2021 is full of dark, brooding fruit. There's a powerful earthiness to the complexity in this wine, and plenty of chalky, cool freshness on the finish. Really well balanced, pure and concentrated.

Berliquet, tucked away between the illustrious names of St-Emilion, really is one to watch. 2017 was the first vintage under the new owners, who also run Chateaux Rauzan Segla and Canon. It’s full of rich plum and blackberry fruit with a mineral complexity alongside woody herbs and licquorice spice. Elegant and silky with soft tannins.

The second wine of celebrated Chateau Canon, from a parcel sandwiched between Berliquet and Angelus. It offers fantastic value for money, with all the concentration and finesse so typical of the property. Full of rich blackcurrant and plum fruit so typical of the vintage, but complemented by just enough crunchier red fruits to create a wonderful refreshing elegance. This seriously over delivers for the price.

This Cheval Blanc is deep and brooding, with notes of pencil lead and spice around the dark fruit. It's finessed and classical, with lots of refined, elegant tannins. Really balanced, and long too, with a nice savouriness to the finish.

Tasted April 2022. Cheval Blanc in 2021 is tremendous, with the majority Cabernet Franc in the blend creating a lovely aromatic wine, with tension and persistence. Rich and concentrated, with very fine tannins and dense wild fruit flavours with lifted violets and dried flowers. There's a gravelly complexity and spice from high quality oak. The fruit is precise, ripe and fresh, with some brighter red fruit combining with fresh acidity to create a very appetising wine, helped by a saline, mineral-driven finish.

Tasted April 2022. Frederic and the team at Figeac have created an incredible wine this year. Bold and perfectly ripe black fruits, there's a brooding quality to the fruit. Very fine and elegant, with all structural elements in good proportion. There's a lovely spiciness building and the tannins are firm now but tightly packed and ripe. Plenty of savoury and mineral notes on the long, textural finish.

Tasted April 2022. Good balance of ripe, dark fruit and sappier red fruits. Medium-bodied with fine tannins, it's a really charming, poised wine. There's a chalky texture and mineral flavours on the finish.

The 2019 La Gaffeliere is a drop-dead gorgeous St-Emilion: the best wine I have tasted from this historic estate. Violets on the nose, with a wonderfully refined, focussed palate. This is so long, and so moreish. A top buy in 2019.

In a vintage where La Gaffelière is one of the wines of the vintage, a hidden gem might just be the second wine, Clos de la Gaffelière. It shows the same purity of Merlot fruit that we've come to love with its bigger brother, with beautiful fragrance and a liquorice-toned finish. Really rather lovely.

The 2020 Château La Gaffelière is another incredible wine from this estate, that's producing some of the finest wines on the right bank right now. Chiselled and precise, with lots of energy, this manages to balance the solar character of the vintage, with real purity and precision. An incredible wine, and one of the picks of the vintage.

Tasted April 2022. Very intense black fruits, with a slight aromatic lift and savoury spice. The acidity is fantastically fresh, but balances so well with the pure, ripe fruit. There's complexity of crushed rock, mint and clove. This has density and concentration, but is perfectly poised. The tannins are ripe and there is a lovely saline, appetising quality to the finish, thanks to a higher than usual proportion of Cabernet Franc.

Tasted April 2022. Soft, ripe fruit with raspberry, blackberry, and blueberry. Slightly crunchier blueberry and raspberry on the finish. The tannins are silky and ripe, and the acidity is crisp but well balanced with the other elements of the wine.

Tasted April 2022. Deep, brooding and concentrated. Velvet texture and very fine tannins. The acidity is fresh but completely in balance with the depth of flavour in the wine. There are mineral, earthy, truffle notes developing and a long, persistent, moreish finish.

Montaiguillon’s 2020 is another resounding success, continuing a string of excellent vintages at the estate. It is a deep ruby colour with notes of spiced plums, cassis and blackberries on the nose. There’s a savoury, graphite note woven through the juicy, sumptuous palate. Its rounded tannins are already integrated with the plump fruit, and the finish has a fresh, balanced length, the likes of which you’d expect from wines with much bigger price tags.

From the Ausone stable of wines, Moulin St-Georges is a smart buy in 2020. It's a generous yet impeccably balanced St-Emilion, that shows the success of merlot in the vintage.

Tasted April 2022. Concentrated and powerful, but still showing the characteristic freshness of the vintage. There's a mixture of ripe black fruit and crunchier red fruits, with a juiciness on the palate which broadens out into a long finish. The structural elements of the wine are tightly wound, but this has the potential to be fantastic with time in bottle. Tannins are ripe and bold at present. There's some lighter, herbal character and aromatics from 30% Cabernet Franc in the blend. 14%.

Second wine of Chateau Pavie, from limestone soils on the plateau, a 50:50 blend of Cabernet Franc and Merlot.

"This is always an extremely masculine, dense, burly wine, and the 2010, which tips the scales at 14.5% alcohol (just slightly under that of the 2009), has a final blend of 80% Merlot and the rest virtually all Cabernet Franc, with just 1% Cabernet Sauvignon. Loads of crushed rock and chalkiness, along with licorice, black truffle, smoked game and black fruits dominate the aromatics and flavor. Backward, formidably endowed, full-bodied and almost atypically massive and huge, with gargantuan extraction, this is a wine for patient connoisseurs to forget about for close to a decade. " 95+ points, Robert Parker

The 2020 Pavie-Macquin is another lovely wine from this impressive Thienpont-owned estate. Fine tannins and intense fruit, with lots of spice and minerality on the finish. Really well put together in 2020.

Tasted April 2022. Seriously concentrated with tightly-packed black cherry and blueberry fruit. As the palate develops more mineral, saline notes emerge and rise to a long fresh finish. Broad and slightly creamy texture with grippy tannins. Really impressive.

Tasted April 2022. Puyblanquet was reacquired by Comte de Malet Roquefort in 2020, and we think this is one to watch. In 2021 it's 25% Cabernet Franc and this gives it a beautiful mineral, savoury quality. There's restrained red plum, blackberry and bramble fruits on the nose and some crushed dried flower, saline notes creating a lovely appetising complexity. The acidity is fresh and the wine is framed by fine tannins.

Tasted April 2022. The 2021 Tertre de la Mouleyre is very fine, with pretty, bright fruits and floral notes. It's very elegant, and has plenty of depth to the dark fruit flavours. The texture is silky and there's an appetising, crushed rock sensation on the finish. Another brilliant vintage from a true gem of St-Emilion.

Floral and expressive, haunting aromatics with wonderful ripeness of fruit. Palate is very textured and fresh, and very saline. Impressive density and length on the finish. This is wonderful.

The 2020 Tertre de la Mouleyre is breathtaking. The nose is pure and soaring, with notes of dark fruit, as well as an almost citrus lift. But it’s on the palate you really feel the potential here. Notes of violet and dark cherry, with sumptuous, impeccably balanced tannins, and a finish that lasts for minutes, with stunning detailing of fruit and loads of minerality. Astonishingly good.

Tasted from a barrel sample sent to the UK, the 2019 Tertre de la Mouleyre has a beautifully floral, elegant nose. There's a purity here, and depth to the dark fruit. Notes of violets, silky tannins and plenty of crushed rocks on the finish. Beautifully structured and poised, this is classic claret at its zenith. Wonderful.

There are big expectations with new ownership for this Grand Cru sandwiched between Angelus and Le Dôme. The 2017 has impressive texture and energy with finely judged tannins.

Troplong Mondot is an estate on the up, and Mondot is a wine from a walled vineyard shared with the celebrated St Emilion estate L’If. In 2019 Mondot is full of verve and tension with a mineral character Its got fragrant red berries and fresh acidity.

Tasted April 2022. An incredible shift has taken place at Troplong-Mondot in the past few years, with the new management seeking fresher, elegant, more appetising wines. The 2021 is a triumph, with dense black fruit and crunchier red fruit flavours, and a savoury, herbal lift from Cabernet Franc. For the first time since 1999 it comes in under 14% alcohol. This balance and elegance carries the wine through to a long, savoury finish. 13.5%.