Cheap wine is irrelevant, part IV

Expert claims most wines that cost less than $30 are junk

How does one respond to a major news site running a wine story headlined: “If you want quality, don’t spend under $30 on a bottle”

Shake your head, go to the keyboard, and once again defend the wine that most of us can afford to drink. Because if the wine business keeps insisting on marketing campaigns like this, wine truly is doomded – no matter how hard I try to save it.

The piece ran last week on the CNBC website, which is big and important enough so that I would assume the editors would know better. I contacted the writer, but never heard back. I didn’t contact the person featured in the story; we’ll just assume he was misquoted and it’s a coincidence that he works for a high-end online wine retailer.

Otherwise, that’s one of the most foolish things I’ve heard in my career in wine. Price, as I like to think I have amply demonstrated over the years, is not the barrier to quality the wine business would have us believe. It’s a guide, certainly, but it’s hardly an ironclad guarantee. I would be hard pressed to find a $30 rose that is four times better than this $7 pink, and I’m willing to bet that most wine types, including the fellow in the story, would find it just as difficult.

In fact, anyone who claims that a $100 wine — let alone a $50 wine — is always fabulous is either narrow minded, misguided, or elitist. Which, unfortunately, describes much of the wine business. What’s even more depressing is that the fellow in the story writes off some terrific $15 and $20 wine in his haste to denigrate “cheap.” Which means he tosses away gems like this Spanish cava, this cru Beaujolais, and that really weird Basque white that I love.

Much of the rest of the story was the usual wine geek stuff about appellations and mass produced wine, buttressed by a bit of winespeak here and there. The more wine changes. … yes?

Finally, the fellow’s qualifications for the $30 pronouncement? That he has tasted some 15,000 wines. We’ll ignore that I have tasted 45,000 in my 20-plus years doing this, which is more or less what many of my colleagues have tasted. What does matter is that any discerning wine drinker – and I can think of dozens of blog readers who fit that description – have also tasted more than that. Which, if you think about it, means they think just the opposite of the story’s expert, don’t they?

Maybe wine isn’t doomded after all.

Photo: “Sun computer found in a junk pile” by bandarji is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

More cheap wine irrelevant:
• It’s official: Cheap wine is irrelevant, part III
• It’s official: Cheap wine is irrelevant, part II
• It’s official: Cheap wine is irrelevant