Wine of the week: Domaine Tariquet Classic 2019

Scores be damned – the Tariquet remains one of the world’s great cheap wines

All you need to know about this vintage of one of the great cheap wines in the history of wine is that it averaged 64 points on CellarTracker, the blog’s unofficial wine inventory app.

That kind of score means the 2019 Domaine Tariquet is undrinkable, which also means it’s worse than every Big Wine supermarket sweet red blend; every mass-produced, 7-Up-style fizzy, faux sparkling wine; and every 15.5 percent, baseball bat fermented chardonnay.

And which also means there is more for me. So maybe the 64 points is a good thing after all.

This version of the Tariquet ($12, purchased, 13%), a French white blend from Gascony, is hardly undrinkable. It’s as it always is – a blend of three grapes, only one of which is well known and two of which (ugni blanc and colombard) are usually held in wine snob contempt.

The wine is clean and fresh, and stunningly well made. I left an open bottle in the refrigerator for a week, and it was just as enjoyable seven days later as it was when I unscrewed it. This vintage has more citrus fruit, though there is still plenty of the white grape juiciness that sets the Tariquet apart from even the best of the Gascon white blends.

Highly recommended, as always, and just the wine to set us up for the next two days on the blog – the announcements of 2022’s Cheap Wine of the Year and Hall of Fame.

Imported by Frederick Wildman and Sons