The Best White Wines Under €20

Hello,

Jancis Robinson once observed that good, inexpensive whites are always harder to find than good, inexpensive reds, and her reason is simple: white wine has nowhere to hide. A red has colour, tannin and oak, and a careless cellar can shelter behind them for a while. A white stands naked in the glass, and every shortcut shows on the first sip.

For this letter I have chosen six with nothing to hide: Battenfeld-Spanier’s estate Riesling from the Zellertal, the Silvaner from Zehnthof Luckert in Sulzfeld, the Sauvignon Blanc from Sattlerhof in Gamlitz, Manincor’s La Manina from Lake Kaltern, Marco De Bartoli’s Grillo from Marsala and the Albariño from Attis in the Salnés.

Case 1 · Six under twenty

Rheinhessen · Franconia · Southern Styria · South Tyrol · Sicily · Rías Baixas

And once again there is a twelve-bottle case: the same six plus six more, all under twenty euros, from Peter Jakob Kühn’s Jacobus from Oestrich to Luneau-Papin’s Muscadet.

Case 2 · Twelve under twenty

The six above · Kühn · Hajszan Neumann · Fritsch · Lageder · Credo · Luneau-Papin

One click adds all six, or all twelve, to your basket.
You can remove or swap individual bottles there.

Battenfeld-Spanier, Hohen-Sülzen

Hans Oliver Spanier, whom everyone calls H.O., started out in Hohen-Sülzen in 1991, fresh from his apprenticeship, at the southern end of Rheinhessen, where the soil is pure limestone. In 1999 he was given the Frauenberg, a slope above Nieder-Flörsheim, and this vineyard now produces his most famous wine, which we sell for €82. He has farmed biodynamically since 2005, as a member of Nicolas Joly’s Renaissance des Appellations, and in the cellar everything ferments spontaneously in Stück casks, with nothing added. In 2006 he married Carolin Gillot, who took over her family’s estate on the Roter Hang, and since then the two of them have run two estates under one roof, with separate vineyards and separate labels. In 2018 the Vinum wine guide named them Winemakers of the Year, and Stephan Reinhardt of The Wine Advocate wrote that in 2022 Spanier had bottled some of the finest dry Rieslings in all of Germany. Spanier himself says that by the time he comes to apply anything he has learned, he must have forgotten it, or there is no room left for intuition. Eisquell is his estate Riesling, and the house calls it its calling card.

Zehnthof Luckert, Sulzfeld am Main

Theo and Luitgard Luckert turned entirely to wine in Sulzfeld in the early sixties, and ten years later they bought the Zehnthof, the tithe house where the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg had his tithes collected from 1558 onwards. Today their sons Wolfgang and Ulrich run the estate, Wolfgang in the vineyards and Uli in the cellar, and Wolfgang’s son Philipp, who trained with Fürst, Christmann and Hirtzberger, makes the reds. All eighteen hectares lie in Sulzfeld, more than half of them planted with Silvaner, in all four of its forms: green, yellow, red and blue. A good fifteen years ago, in the middle of a residential area, Uli Luckert rescued five hundred square metres of ungrafted Silvaner from 1870 that was due to make way for a building project. The owner had noticed shoots coming out of the ground every spring, although almost nothing of the vines could still be seen above it. This vineyard is called Creutz, and Vinum has just named the 2024 the best Silvaner in Germany, with 97 points. The year before, the Zehnthof was Winery of the Year, and Stuart Pigott considers Uli Luckert possibly the finest white-wine maker in Franconia. Luckert himself once said that fruit is kitsch, and that Silvaner lets the soil speak like no other variety because it holds back on aroma. The estate Silvaner is where you can put that to the test.

Sattlerhof, Gamlitz

In the sixties Wilhelm Sattler turned the farm on the Sernauberg above Gamlitz into a wine estate, and his wines, ten per cent alcohol, ten grams of acidity, no residual sugar, earned him ridicule at the time. Today that is the style of the whole of Southern Styria. His son Willi took over in the late seventies, when his father fell ill, and Willi’s sons have run the estate for a good ten years, Andreas in the cellar and Alexander in the vineyards, which he converted to biodynamics with the 2016 vintage. There are a hundred and twenty thousand vines on thirty-five hectares, and each gives roughly one bottle. The Trinkaus vineyard already appears on maps two hundred years old, and in 2021 it produced the first Styrian wine with a hundred Falstaff points, a Sauvignon Blanc, which we sell for €99. Gault&Millau writes that Trinkaus is not the only wine here to show world class. “Life is hard in the mountains,” says Alexander Sattler, and that is exactly what you can taste in the wine. Kleine Gärten, “small gardens”, is his answer to the structural change in Southern Styria: together with two neighbours, Karl Renner and Lorenz Menhard, the Sattlers farm small steep sites worth preserving, organically, with hand picking and spontaneous fermentation. This Sauvignon Blanc is the first vintage in the series.

Manincor, Kaltern

The Manincor manor house has stood by Lake Kaltern since 1608, and its coat of arms shows a hand on a heart, man in cor. Count Michael Goëss-Enzenberg took over the estate from his uncle in 1991, and it was not until 1996 that wine was made in its own cellar: six wines, and thirty thousand bottles the following year. Today there are fifty hectares in Kaltern and Terlan, farmed biodynamically since 2006 with Demeter certification, and in 2007 Manincor was one of the founders of respekt-BIODYN. In 2004 the count had the cellar built beneath the vineyard; vines grow on its roof once more, and it is heated with wood chips from the estate’s own forests. These forests also supply just under a third of the oak for the casks; the wood dries for three years and then goes to the cooper Stockinger. A forest needs a hundred years to grow back, says the count, and one has to treat it with care. His Sauvignon Lieben Aich holds Tre Bicchieri from Gambero Rosso, and we sell it for €73. Manina is Italian for “little hand”, and I assume it refers to the hand on the coat of arms.

Marco De Bartoli, Marsala

Marco De Bartoli was a racing driver. In 1977, at the wheel of an Osella, he finished second in the last Targa Florio to be run as a race, and the following year he took over his family’s baglio, a walled Sicilian farmstead, in Contrada Samperi outside Marsala. Ageing there in old casks was a wine that the local farmers had topped up for generations by the perpetuo method, without fortification, and in 1980 De Bartoli bottled it as Vecchio Samperi, as a wine from Marsala, not as Marsala. In 1990, according to the family, he became the first to bottle a varietal Grillo, the grape which until then had been used there only for Marsala. In 1995 the public prosecutor in Marsala charged him with adulterating wine; the business came to a standstill, and five years later he was acquitted. He had been shot down, he said later, just as he was taking off. Decanter counts Vecchio Samperi among Italy’s icons; we sell it for €60.50, and the Quarantennale, a perpetuo with an average age of forty years, for €469. Marco De Bartoli died in 2011, and Marsala has named a piazza after him. His children Renato and Giuseppina run the house. Their brother Sebastiano died in June 2025, and the 2025 harvest, which the family calls an exceptional one, is dedicated to him.

Attis, Val do Salnés

The brothers Baldomero and Robustiano Fariña grew up among vines and mussel rafts. In the fifties their grandfather, a merchant seaman, had moored three bateas in the Ría de Arousa, the wooden rafts from which mussels are grown in the Salnés, and the family still harvests around three hundred tonnes a year from them. In the late eighties their father opened a restaurant in Meaño, and the sons made the wine for it themselves, at first in the garage, eight thousand bottles. Since 2000 it has been called Attis, after the charioteer and lover of the goddess Cybele; Robustiano had come across the name in a book on art history. We had no pazo and we were not counts, he says. A pazo is a Galician manor house. In 2012 the brothers dug their cellar into the granite, and their Nana 2023 earned 94 points and a place in James Suckling’s Top 100 of the year. Their most expensive Albariño spends six months hanging twelve metres deep from the family’s own mussel rafts, and we sell it for €91. No wine is more Atlantic than a mussel farmer’s, says the family. Xión is their youngest Albariño.

Six more, for the twelve-bottle case

These six join them in the twelve-bottle case, introduced more briefly. Two of them, Kühn’s Jacobus and the Gemischter Satz from the Nussberg, could just as well have been among the first six.

What to open first?

When the case arrives, put all six in the fridge. Drink the Eisquell and the Silvaner on the first evening, with bread and butter or with sausages, at eight degrees. The Albariño and the Sauvignon Blanc belong with fish or mussels. Save La Manina and the Grillo for an evening when you are cooking, and serve them at ten to twelve degrees.

Six under twenty:
1× Battenfeld-Spanier Eisquell 2025 → mirabelle, white peach, limestone
1× Luckert Silvaner 2025 → pear, chervil, strictly dry
1× Sattlerhof Kleine Gärten Sauvignon Blanc 2025 → green asparagus, sugar snaps, citrus
1× Manincor La Manina 2025 → quince, lychee, pink grapefruit
1× De Bartoli Grillo Vignaverde 2025 → peach, lemon, salt
1× Attis Xión 2025 → lemon balm, fennel, green apple

The twelve-bottle case adds the Jacobus and the Gemischter Satz, the Roter Veltliner and the Misto Mare for the aperitif, the Miranius for an evening with sardines and the Muscadet for the oysters.

Six under twenty 6 wines · approx. €90 →

Twelve under twenty 12 wines · approx. €180 →

One click adds all six, or all twelve, to your basket. You can remove or swap individual bottles there.

Warm regards from Berlin,

David and the
Living Wines team

P.S. If you want to see where all this leads at Luckert: the Creutz 2024 comes from the five hundred square metres of ungrafted Silvaner that Uli Luckert rescued from the residential area, eight hundred vines dating from around 1870, planted fifty centimetres apart, their heads now sunk into the ground. Vinum named it the best Silvaner in the country, with 97 points. Approx. €195.

Six under twenty 6 wines · approx. €90 →

Twelve under twenty 12 wines · approx. €180 →