Tag Archives: value wine

Welcome to the fight, Wine Spectator

wine spectator
“C’mon, WC. You’re making this up.”

No, this isn’t a Dry January joke – the most Winestream of all the Winestream Media is endorsing “cheap” wine

Who says, to paraphrase the great Shirley Povich, that hell can’t freeze over?

The Wine Spectator, perhaps the most Winestream of all the Winestream Media, is endorsing “cheap” wine. On Friday, the magazine announced its first ever “Top 10 Values” list and its 2021 “Wine Value of the Year.”

Sound familiar?

Of course, because it is the Spectator, scores are involved and the wines on the best value list can cost as much as $40. Which, of course, is cheap only for people who read the Wine Spectator. But the 2021 top value wine is a $17 New Zealand sauvignon blanc, which wouldn’t be out of place in a review posted on a website run by a certain cranky ex-newspaperman.

So who am I to quibble?

And, no, I don’t know why the Spectator is doing this. Does it mean someone there actually knows who I am and thinks that what I do has merit? Which is actually kind of terrifying – the wine business is screwed up enough without the Spectator borrowing from me. What’s next? Someone in California admitting that premiumization is destroying wine as we know it?

Or, and which is more likely, someone did a marketing study and saw a need to focus on labels other than the stereotypical Spectator wine – which always seem to be red, made in Napa, and cost $80. Because, of course, young people.

Regardless, welcome to the fight, Wine Spectator. It’s good to see you acknowledge that wine doesn’t have to cost as much as a laptop to be worth drinking. Who knows? Maybe we can work out some sort of joint thing next year when I do the Hall of Fame and you do your next value list.

And, then to paraphrase my pal Dave McIntyre, I can declare victory in the cheap wine wars and retire to my back porch, where I will drink Gascon wine and tell long, boring stories about the old days.

Photo: Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash

What is value in wine?

value in wineThis question comes up every once in a while in the wine cyber ether, and then there is a flurry of activity as the various angels dance on the heads of their respective pins. But determining value in wine deserves more attention than that.

It is the ultimate question for any consumer good, be it ketchup or automobiles or blue jeans. Did you get more value from the product than you paid for it? Was the wine worth more than it cost? But this is a complicated question to ask, let alone answer, given how different everyone’s palate is. My idea of value is probably different from yours, which is neither good nor bad. It just is, and people who read the blog know what I like and whether it matches what they want. That’s the best we can hope for

Further complicating the issue: Value doesn’t matter to most of the Winestream Media, which treats every wine the same regardless of price. A 92 is a 92 is a 92, and while you sometimes see a producer boasting that its $12 wine got a 91, only the most cynical or most desperate will boast their their $100 wine got a 91.

So where does that leave us with value in wine?

• Value probably doesn’t matter in very cheap wine. No one buys $3 wine for value; they buy it because it’s cheap. That it tastes good is an unexpected bonus.

• Value also doesn’t matter much for expensive wine. Who pays $200 for a bottle hoping they’re getting $300 worth of wine? Besides, who pays $200 for a bottle and then admits it was crappy? Wine has taught us that it’s an excellent wine because it cost so much, and who are we to argue?

• Value is all in wine that costs $8 to $20, despite the wine business’ best efforts to convince us otherwise. I wrote this in the cheap wine book, and I’ll repeat it until I die at the keyboard: The vast majority of wine that that costs between $15 and $20 isn’t worth it, because it sells us what’s outside the bottle – the label, the name, the appeal to the appropriate demographic – instead of what’s inside. I taste these wines all the time (got eight samples last week, in fact), and it’s the same regardless of where they’re from or whose name is on them – the least expensive grapes and the most basic winemaking, but a label that preens about the wine’s quality. Nowhere is there $15 worth of wine in the bottle.

Winebits 280: “Value” wine, blind tasting, wine scores

? Missing the point:The Wine Curmudgeon does not like being cranky all the time. I would much rather be happy, secure in the knowledge that the wine world ?s foolishness is a thing of the past. And then I run across stuff like this, which explains why a $200 bottle of wine can be a value. So can a Ferrari, I suppose, if it ?s the previous year ?s model with low mileage. The point, of course, is that blog posts and stories like these scare the hell out of most wine drinkers, and particularly those wine drinkers who are just getting started or haven ?t really started yet. They see advice to buy $200 wine and run, in panic-stricken terror, for the soft drink aisle of the supermarket.

? The power of blind tasting: Mike Veseth at the Wine Economist talks about several recent tastings, where ?where the wines easily fooled us (or perhaps we just fooled ourselves). .. ? The point being that the tastings were done blind, and the results did not jive with what was expected. Wrote Veseth: ?Our perception of wine is sometimes less about truth and more about  context and expectations than we might want to think. That ?s not the conclusion I thought I would find when I set up this tiny experiment. ? He also writes interestingly about the power of cheap wine (in this case, Two-buck Chuck) to skew the results. This is why blind tasting is the most powerful tool the reviewer ? or any wine drinker, for that matter ? can use.

? Coffee-flavor those wine scores: W. Blake Gray, who isn ?t thrilled with wine scores but long ago made his peace with them, can offer a much more refreshing take on the subject than those of us who think scores are the spawn of the devil. He analyzed the scores that 29 California cabernet sauvignons and red blends received in a recent Wine Spectator, and found that that the wines that mentioned mocha in the tasting notes got at least 92 points; those that didn ?t didn ?t break 89. Yes, it ?s a small sample size, and so on and so forth, but telling nonetheless.

2011 $10 Wine Hall of Fame

$10halloffame
This should have been a grand and glorious $10 Wine Hall of Fame. The recession forced consumers to drink down, and we’re buying more cheap wine than ever before — and, hopefully, learning that we don’t have to pay too much money or attention to scores to find quality wine. In fact, I added six wines to the fifth annual Hall this year, because there was that much great $10 wine to find.

But I also tasted way too much flabby and dull $10 wine in 2010, and especially from California. Producers, apparently, were throwing anything in a bottle that they could sell for $10 or less, regardless of quality, in order to attract customers. The result was wine that tasted as if it had been made to a formula, and a cynical one at that. Call it the white zinfandel style — lots of sweet fruit and not much else. So it should be no coincidence that no California wines made the Hall this year.

That’s why the 2011 Hall of Fame a mixed bag. Yes, six wines were added, but four dropped out: La Ferme de Gicon, a red blend from the Rhone, which was lacking this year; vini merlot from Bulgaria and the Lockwood sauvignon blanc, which apparently aren ?t available in the Dallas area any more; and Meridian ?s chardonnay, which tasted nothing like last year ?s vintage. In this, the Meridian seemed to demonstrate what was wrong with California’s approach to wine last year — dumb it down, spend less on it, and figure no one will notice.

One other 2011 note: I’m establishing a special place in the Hall — call it the Asterisk Wing — for the Vitiano red, white and rose made by the great Riccardo Cotarella. These Italian wines are sometimes $10 and sometimes $11, and it’s kind of silly to keep moving them in and out of the Hall because the dollar fluctuates against the euro or because retailers are playing with margin.

The new members are:

? Chateau Barat, a French rose and an incredible wine. It started with lots of strawberry fruit and then morphed into something with a long, minerally finish — and does it with only 12 percent alcohol.

? Casamatta Toscana, perhaps the best cheap sangiovese I’ve ever had. Price note: This wine, like the Vitianos, is apparently $10 in places other than Dallas.

? Chateau Boisson, a white French wine that is “about as close as I have come to finding older-style white Bordeauxs that don’t taste like New Zealand sauvignon blanc.”

? Ch teau Parench re Bordeaux Blanc Sec, a white Bordeaux that is pleasantly floral and fruity (lime and melon?), but with a firm backbone.

? Marqu s de C ceres Rioja Rosado, a grocery store Spanish rose that “is full of strawberry fruit, is bone dry, offers great value, and is barbecue friendly on a 100-degree Texas afternoon.”

? Anne Aimee Muller-Thurgau Cuvee A, an Oregon white wine that is “somewhere between an off-dry German riesling and an old-style gewurtztraminer — sweetish but also spicy.” A tip o’ the Curmudgeon’s fedora to Jennifer Uygur, who sold me this wine and then gave up retail in 2010 to open a restaurant with her husband. Good luck, Jennifer and David.

The holdover wines are:

? The chenin blanc, CNW, and a chenin blanc-viognier blend, Chenin Vio, from Vinum Cellars in California. One caveat: These wines are not $10 everywhere, and the CNW seems to be in short supply.

? Notorius, a white wine from Sicily. This was just one of almost a dozen Sicilian wines that cost $10 or less and offer spectacular value, almost all of which are worthy of inclusion.

? The $10 wines from California ?s Bogle Vineyards, and especially the petite sirah.

? Cristalino, the Spanish sparkling wine, which comes in brut (dry), extra dry (sweeter than brut) and rose.

? California ?s Toad Hollow pinot noir rose.

? The Yellow+Blue box wines, and especially the malbec, about $12 for a 1-liter box.

? Domaine Tariquet, a white blend from Gascony, which is the representative for several other Gascon wines made with obscure grapes that deserve to be better known.

Previous $10 Wine Hall of Fames:
? 2010
? 2009
? 2008
? 2007