Top 36 wines for summer

Tim Atkin selects his best bottles of the season

EXTRA-BRUT

Sparkling: 2001 Champagne NV Extra Brut, Dumangin Fils, £19.50, Yapp Brothers, 01747 860423
Dumangin deserves to be better known. This very dry Champagne is elegant and yeasty with a lovely mousse and a fine, tapering finish. Hard to beat under £20

Why so many samples? The answer is that I wanted to come up with 36 ace wines for my OFM summer selection. Over the course of a week, breaking off to catch the odd glimpse of Wimbledon or the World Cup, I tasted a huge number of wines. As ever, there were some horrors on offer, with an Aussie Chardonnay called Little Penguin taking the DNPIM (Do Not Put In Mouth) award. But there were also some excellent wines. The rosés were particularly good, reflecting a significant leap in quality (and interest) over the past 12 months. I picked four in the end, but I could easily have chosen a dozen. No wonder pink wines are growing in popularity.

As ever, my aim was to assemble as diverse a line-up as possible. The 36 wines came from a dozen different countries: France (11 wines), Italy and Australia (four each), Portugal, Spain and New Zealand (three each), Argentina and Germany (two each) and South Africa, Chile, Austria and the United States (one each). As a committed Francophile, I make no apology for selecting so many wines from France. For all the country's political and economic malaise, it stands torso, head and shoulders above its rivals when it comes to wine.

In choosing the winners, I applied two criteria: value for money and quality. I didn't set out to find any under-£3 wines (in fact, I thought it unlikely) but I discovered two that should satisfy readers on a tight budget. Even harder was choosing wines between £6 and £10, the price range where there is a plethora of good bottles. Overall, the wines that made it through had to be exceptional - at least I think so.

After a week's tasting and writing, I've just recycled the last empty bottle. I gave my neighbours, the staff in the local Starbucks and anyone else I could think of at least two cases of opened samples each and still litres of wine went down the sink. I hope you don't feel the need to follow suit. But if you don't enjoy a particular recommendation, there are 35 others for you to try. Happy drinking!

By Tim Atkin - Observer - Sunday July 23, 2006