Five days drinking $20 wine
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
Yes, the wine was better – but twice as better? Hardly — and I was surprised
The Wine Curmudgeon, who always tries to keep an open mind, spent one working week last month drinking only wine with dinner that cost $18 or $20 (or more). The goal? To see if the wines were truly twice as good as the $10 and $12 wines I usually drink.
And you know what? They weren’t. Which actually kind of surprised me.
This is not to say that most of the wines weren’t well made and interesting. They were. But compared to the quality $10 wines I usually drink, they didn’t especially stand out. For example, I spent $18 for a Spanish rose and $30 for a white Bordeaux, and both were enjoyable wines. But the rose was not $18 worth of nice, and as was terrific as the white Bordeaux was, it wasn’t $30 worth of terrific.
How is this possible, given the regular drumbeat from producers and the Winestream Media that we’re spending more money and drinking better?
A variety of reasons:
• Higher prices for the more expensive wines, thanks to the Trump tariff, pandemic supply chain woes, the war in Europe, and inflation. That means a wine that might have been a value at $18 but now costs $23 isn’t a value any more. This hasn’t necessarily been the case with my cheap wines, where producers have been more reluctant to hike prices.
• Marketing, marketing, and more marketing. It’s just not about the wines I noted last week; rather, it’s about shelves of wines that have been created to cost $20 or more because premiumization. When’s the last time anyone spent $I8 on a Chilean chardonnay or a $35 California rose? Yet that’s what I got as samples recently.
• Most importantly, the $10 and $12 wines that I drink – and recommend on the blog (subscribe now!) – are not supermarket plonk. It’s easy to “drink better” by spending more money if the cheap wine you’re drinking tastes cheap. But what if you’re drinking this? Or this? Or this? It’s much more difficult.
Photo: “drink more wine” by wrapped4good is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.