Ask the WC 32: Wine prices, wine and health, Ukraine

This edition of Ask the WC: How much trouble does the WC have finding cheap wine to review? Plus, the latest wine and health update and Ukraine wine.

Because the customers always have questions, and the Wine Curmudgeon has answers in this irregular feature. You can Ask the Wine Curmudgeon a wine-related question by clicking here.

Greetings, Cheap Wine Guru:
I saw the post about how you bought 11 bottles of wine for about $11 each. How is that possible, given inflation and premiumization and all the rest?
$10 wine

Dear $10:
The short answer is that I spend a lot of time looking for wine to review that meets the blog’s criteria. The long answer is that I shop at close to a dozen retailers, including national supermarket chains, and it takes up a fair amount of my working week. Ironically, given the way the wine business works, I review very few samples — most are either too expensive, too poorly made, or both. In 2021, I spent $4,800 looking for wine for the blog.
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Dear Wine Curmudgeon:
Are you going to write a definitive wine and health post? There is so much confusion out there about whether wine will kill someone.
Healthy wine drinker

Dear Healthy:
Drink wine in moderation. That pretty much covers it. The rest — allowing for my lack of medical credentials — is smoke, mostly from neo-Prohibitionists who want everyone to quit drinking everything because too much alcohol is dangerous. Which, of course, is absolutely true. But hot dogs may be even more deadly (nitrites!), and I haven’t seen any of the researchers who are doing junk like this conducting similar pseudo-studies about hot dogs.
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Hi, WC:
You haven’t written anything about Ukraine and what’s going on there. How come?
Surprised

Dear Surprised:
I started a Ukraine post a couple of times — there is wine in the country, believe it or not — but could never quite figure out what to say. I’ve mostly stayed away from politics on the blog and there really wasn’t a way to write about Ukraine without injecting politics into it. But know that my family left that part of Eastern Europe more than 100 years ago, and the reasons then are just as applicable now.

Photo: MART PRODUCTION from Pexels

More Ask the WC:
• Ask the WC 31: Pinot noir, minimum pricing, wine apocalypse
• Ask the WC 30: BYOB, wine for friends, California fires
• Ask the WC 29: Birthday gifts, larger bottles, and on-line