Wine of the week: Brumont La Gascogne 2015

Best producer tasting note ever? “This wine has very little residual sugar and can accompany almost any meal.”

The Brumont La Gascogne isn’t the best Gascon wine I’ve ever had, and no one will ever confuse it with something to make a wine geek get all twitchy. But it’s certainly well worth what it costs, and isn’t that the point? And that’s because the producer understands cheap wine, as it shows on the tasting notes: “…it can accompany almost any meal.”

What more do we want – just a cheap wine that offers value and that we can drink without a lot of fuss? The Brumont La Gascogne ($10, purchased, 12.5%) is a white blend (gros manseng and sauvignon blanc) from southwestern France that does just that. It’s a solid, well-made wine – tart and citrusy, crisp and even a little minerality if you look hard enough. And if it’s not as grapey as I like, that’s not going to stop me from buying and enjoying it again.

And yes, unless you’re serving prime rib, you can drink this with anything from Chinese takeout to hamburgers to roast chicken to one of those salads made with all the leftovers in the refrigerator..

I took a lot of criticism from California wine devotees for the recent California value post, where I argued that there is almost no value left in the California wine that most of us can afford to drink. The Brumont La Gascogne is a case in point. There are probably only a handful of $10 California wines that are widely available that are of this quality, or of the quality of most $10 Gascon wine. That so many producers in California don’t seem interested in doing this should worry those of us who drink cheap wine.