THE vineyards close to the town of Mâcon in southern Burgundy are the source of cheap, cheerful and very acceptable white wine.

A few growers also now show that far better wine can be made there. One of them is Christophe Cordier.

The view from his neat cellars, beside his modern house on the edge of the village of Fuissé is superb. Below the two dramatic limestone scars of Vergisson and Solutré, the neat vineyards fill every fold of the land.

The most famous wine produced here is Pouilly-Fuissé, which now costs a pretty penny, but there are many other sites where, with a bit of care, Chardonnay can be coaxed into making something special.

Christophe took over the family estate in 1987 and now owns 25 hectares of vines, scattered here and there in around a hundred small blocks. It’s hard work simply tracking around them all to ensure that everything is in order.

This summer, with so much changeable weather, his big worry has been powdery mildew. The difficulty of treating so many separate plots is one of the reasons why he hasn’t adopted a fully organic regime, though he treats his vines as little as possible.

The positive side of having so many parcels of vines is the huge range of different flavours available to him. “Even in just a hundred metres, the differences can be enormous,” he told me. “For example, on the north-facing slopes, the grapes retain much more acidity.”

In addition to his own vineyards, since 2003 Christophe has also bought grapes from a number of other smaller growers. He chooses very carefully, and has a keen eye for plots of old vines that give small quantities of high quality, flavourful grapes, which also express as fully as possible the unique character of the place where they were grown.

This side of the business has grown sufficiently for Christophe to take the plunge and begin to build a second winery down in the village just to handle the grapes he buys in.

Some 80% of all he makes is exported, with the UK getting the lion’s share at around 30%. His wines are available here through both Majestic and The Wine Society.

Unlike those growers who make the cheaper versions of Mâconnais wine, everything is picked by hand.

After gentle pressing, only the natural, ambient yeasts are used to ferment the wine. In the best Burgundian tradition this takes place in oak casks, big foudres for most of the wine from bought-in grapes and small casks for the wine from his own vines.