The Best (Actually Thoughtful) Bottles of Wine to Gift This Year

When it comes to gifting wine, two things are true: a thoughtfully chosen bottle is among the best gifts one can receive, and a hastily chosen, mass-market label is among the worst. The key is to show it’s a present you’ve put real thought and care into, and the easiest way to achieve this is to pull something from your cellar that you’ve aged yourself. For those whose manor house didn’t come with a subterranean claret room, however, there’s a workaround—you’ll need to sleuth out the aged bottles that are hiding in in plain sight all around us. We’re here with a map of where to look.

READ MORE: Ask a Wine Expert: 11 Bottles for Hyper-Specific Occasions

1. Poplar Grove Merlot 2014, $82.50

Most good Okanagan wineries sell all they make out of necessity, so finding aged bottles is rare. There are a few that sometimes have one-offs (Mission Hill and Quails’ Gate are good to check out) but no one has shown a commitment to building a cache of library wines like Naramata’s Poplar Grove. They’ve always made the sacrifice of holding back bottles of their flagship reds to release in their prime drinking windows, and have even given those aged bottles a special label. Here’s a gem that shows what you can do with merlot at the intersection of great grapes and plenty of patience.

2. Taylor Fladgate Vintage 2000, $116

The quality of port is at the best it’s ever been, but popularity has been waning for years. This inexplicable slide is your chance to open someone’s eyes to one of the greatest deals in all of vin-dom. Fifty years ago, a bottle of vintage port cost the same as Château Mouton Rothschild (the current vintage of that goes for roughly $1,500). Today you can enjoy this stellar vintage from a legendary port producer without having to sell a kidney. Your giftee will be able to drink a fully mature wonder of a wine—rich but still fresh and vibrant—that few other bottles can match at any price.

3. Chateau de Fieuzal Bordeaux Blanc 2016, $80

Aging whites is not for the faint of heart: when they turn, they turn hard. But Bordeaux whites—made from sauvignon blanc with some semillon for ballast—are built to last and to sing as they get older. And while the category can be wild, price-wise (Haut Brion Blanc costs $1,600), there are impressive aged wines for $100 and under—such as this ready-to-drink-but-can-still-cellar-for-a-decade number, which has impressive mouthfeel and body, plus a touch of almost waxiness that’s unforgettable. If your giftee likes New Zealand sauv blanc, watch their horizons expand exponentially.

One more Good Gift Idea: The Complete Bordeaux Vintage Guide from 1870 to 2024

Speaking of Bordeaux, no region seems more defined by “good” and “bad” vintages than this famed enclave of the coastal French elite. And while having a book called The Complete Bordeaux Vintage Guide from 1870 to 2024 seems anachronistic in these days of AI, when the writer is the insightful and wry Neal Martin it’s more guided journey than numerical output.