Is the $14 Yalumba viognier the new best cheap wine in the world?

Fortunately, there are two kinds of Yalumba viogniers for sale in the U.S.

This year, you can actually buy one of the grocery store wines that won a platinum medal at this year’s Decanter World Wine Awards. It’s so widely available, in fact, that I’ve written about it on the blog – the Australian Yalumba Eden Valley viognier, about $14 in the U.S.

This wine got 95 points and was “really impressive,” with “toast, butter, peach and nectarine and subtle highlights of rose water… richly flavoured but wonderfully balanced with a flow of white peach and ginger on the long finish.”

There are actually two sorts of Yalumba wines for sale in the U.S. The Decanter winner is from the more expensive Samuel’s Garden Collection; the other, called the Y series, made the $10 Hall of Fame in 2013. Its consistency isn’t always there, but at times the Y series wines have approached Bogle and McManis for overall quality.

So why this post? Because last year, the Decanter competition gave us the infamous $7 La Moneda malbec from Chile, which wasn’t for sale in the U.S.. But Internet wine and food types, and some even mainstream news organizations, kept calling it a Walmart wine because it was sold at a supermarket owned by Walmart in Great Britain. And Walmart is Walmart is Walmart, right? Call it fake news for the wine drinker.

I got 32 comments when I wrote about the La Moneda the first time, which is about 32 more than I get for most posts. Many of the comments asked where they could buy the wine even though the point of the post was that it wasn’t for sale in the U.S.

So go buy the Yalumba, even if it isn’t $10. Or buy one of the Y series wines, which are $10. Whatever, please don’t leave a comment asking where it’s for sale. I don’t want to go through that again.