Affordable wines made from Sémillon

 
Peter Grogan investigates a grape variety with a split personality.

When the hammer went down at Sotheby's last year for a collection of 70 consecutive vintages of Château d'Yquem, the world's greatest sweet wine, the price set a record for a single lot in a UK wine auction of nearly £400,000. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, more people have probably heard of Yquem than of sémillon, the grape variety it's primarily made from. But those who are familiar with sémillon are on to a good thing, because in addition to making one of the world's most famous wines it produces some of the best value whites around.

Sémillon doesn't get the attention that sauvignon blanc (which it is often blended with) and chardonnay enjoy but it's a versatile grape that isn't just restricted to sweet wines from Sauternes and Barsac. Whether it's everyday bottles from Entre-Deux-Mers in the £4-7 range, or Sunday-best wines from Graves and Pessac-Léognan, Yquem's Bordeaux neighbours deserve a collective medal for improving their dry whites dramatically over the past five years.

The buyer of those 70 bottles probably knows that they would be unlikely to fetch the same figure today, so what could they expect for their money if they decided to cut their losses and drink them, rather than count on their value increasing? The French have a phrase that translates roughly as being inhabited by a fine wine and it's true that Yquem has extraordinarily intense flavours – often of apricots and marmalade – that linger on the palate for several minutes and remain imprinted on your sensory memory forever.

Many people run a mile from sweet wines of any kind. Those clammy, half-sweet German horrors of the Seventies and Eighties certainly put many of us off. The wines we're talking about are a different proposition and combine rich, honeyed fruit flavours with enough of the tingly acidity necessary to stop them from being cloying. A glimpse of what all the fuss is about can be had for very little money. If Jancis Robinson calls something that costs £9.99 for a half-bottle (that will keep for a week once opened) the best supermarket wine in the UK then we can all gather round and toast a brighter future with it. (It's Waitrose Sauternes 2005 made by one of the top producers, Château Suduiraut.)

Fourth-generation winemaker Bérénice Lurton rules the roost at Yquem's neighbour Château Climens, which is catching up fast with them in terms of quality. ''I think of sémillon as a neutral grape,'' she says. ''It's essentially a blank canvas on which the winemaker is free to express his individual style. This makes it a wonderful translator of the terroir. If the grape is a canvas, then it's the terroir – the characteristics of the vineyard's soil, its weather and the vines exposure to it – that provides the paint.''

The fact that Yquem's winemaker is female calls into question Bordeaux's reputation for stuffy conservatism, even more so since Sandrine Garbay has been doing it for a decade, since the tender age of 28. She doesn't see any particular feminine affinity with sémillon though. "I don't think there are grapes that women work better with and I don't think it would be possible to tell if a wine was made by a man or a woman. It's more about the individual's style and sensibility than their sex,'' she says.

The biggest name in dry whites is Château Haut-Brion. To taste its austere white wines alongside its luscious Yquem counterpart it seems impossible that they could even be made from the same grape varieties.

But they often tend to have some oak-ageing, which adds a toasty edge and a certain creamy character to an already complex flavour base, where the fuller, dried pineapple flavours of the sémillon are edged with grassy sauvignon notes. Sisters Sylvie and Marie Courselle make their Château de Thieuley from well-established vines (see Wines of the Week). ''It gets interesting once they are past about 15 years of age, when the yields are naturally lower. Then we can make wines with very complex aromas.''

Sémillon has made its quiet way to most corners of the world. Its home-from-home in the New World is Australia's Hunter Valley. Producers such as McWilliam's, established in 1877, whose bold Elizabeth is a serious partner for roast pork, and de Bortoli (a sprightly 80) makes wonderfully detailed, age-worthy wines where steely minerality is tempered with floral scents. Noble One is de Bortoli's sumptuous answer to Sauternes.

South Africa has a long and successful history of planting sémillon, but at the lowest end of the price scale (under £5) the quality is often lacking. Over the past couple of decades a huge number of people have fled from the complexity and inconsistency that buying French wine often involves. It's good news, especially for those feeling the pinch, that our nearest neighbour can now point to a region that is learning to combine quality with good value.