With its iconic red wines and its lush, botrytis nectars from Sauternes and Barsac, Bordeaux’s dry white wines – Bordeaux Blancs – can easily get overlooked. But dry white Bordeaux are excellent everyday wines, offering real value at almost every price point.

While Pessac-Leognan is the hub for the most coveted whites from producers like the venerated Chateau Haut-Brion and the stunning but more wallet-friendly Domaine de Chevalier, there is also a value zone under $40 for Pessac-Leognan AOP. If we extend to Graves, then many great value wines can be found for less than $30 a bottle.

Today, we want to set an even more challenging price, looking for wines retailing at $15-$20 a bottle, and for that we need to look at more generic appellations such as Bordeaux Blanc, Cotes de Bordeaux, and Entre-Deux-Mers, which are often undervalued by consumers but can offer judicious choices for whites.

Just as high-sugar desserts like lemon pies and cheesecakes have gone out of fashion with health-conscious consumers these days, so too demand for sweet and luscious wines is also on a decline. Some lush, botrytis wines have since started to run “dry.” At least, for the most prestigious appellations like Sauternes, we have seen producers over the last two decades diversify their products to include dry wines in their inventory. This stylistic transition, and even simply producing a dry wine, could be considered treacherous in the eyes of those who firmly believe in and seek to uphold Sauternes’ sweet identity. But while the purists debate, for consumers, there’s an opportunity to get hold of some great value wines from well-respected names who sell their dry whites under the “Bordeaux Blanc” appellation.

In our selection below of Bordeaux blancs under $25 (mostly just above $15), you will find three dry whites from Sauternes, but they are not allowed to be labeled as such. One comes from Clos des Lunes, a property in Sauternes dedicated to dry whites run by Olivier Bernard of Domaine de Chevalier, who also co-owns Chateau Guiraud, where they make a great-value Bordeaux Blanc, too. R de Rieussec Bordeaux Blanc 2017 is another great-buy of dry white from Sauternes that scored 95 points.

Entre-Deux-Mers and Cotes de Bordeaux are the other under-explored value zones. The best examples are crisp and fresh and tend to show vivid, exotic fruit and enticing mineral complexity. Some even bring a taut and minerally transparent texture that creates a linear tension on the palate, which is usually an engaging quality for more expensive bottles. With these, you have the chance to discover that tense, linear, and mineral texture at a fraction of the price.

– Zekun Shuai, associate editor