Wine drinkers?

[BigJ]

Thought LOTH would like a rose on this HOT night. WRONG. She cooled off a Loire red. Great! Now we need to decide if there is to be a digestif.

 

[Toothpick]

I love wine. I just don't 'get it'. There's so many varieties and they all have fancy names that are hard to pronounce let alone remember. When I'm in the mood I just blindly choose a bottle based on how much I feel like spending. I'm rarely disapointed because it all tastes good to me. But then agian....maybe I'm not "tasting" the wine and just drinking the wine.

 

[BigJ]

Andre, I couldn't agree more. We are VERY fortunate to have just such a retailer in my town. I simply can not refer to this store as a "liquor store". It's so much more. Probably 20,000 bottles of wine on the floor at any time. Shelf after shelf of spirits from low brow to to downright rare around here. I don't know really what to call it but I like it. The best part is the owner. A most sensible chap who never tries to oversell you ANYTHING. He was one of the first to let me know that there is much more difference between a $10 bottle of wine and one at $20 than between 20 and 100 dollars. At least for my untrained palate. I have not been led wrong by that advice so far. He has pointed me to several nice bottles of different types and one was an especially nice Pinot Noir that was so smooth and gracious and I stupidly forgot to write down the name and year. I think it was about $14 and was really good. At least to me. I drank it by itself and with a big beef roast and it was super either way. Pinot is definately on my check it out list. I think I read that this is the grape of many of France's great burgundy region wines. At least I think that's right. I agree with your practice of buying "drink it now" wines. I have neither the time nor education to try cellaring. Thanks for the lists of wines. It gives me yet another distraction to spend money on.

Regards, Todd

+1. I would add that you need to find a good shop that matches your palate. We have several knowledgeable merchants here in Seattle, but there are only two that closely match our palate (leans towards Washington State and French). We are also lucky because we can easily travel to local wineries to see what they are up to (of the many we have visited, only a few have proved worth supporting.)

The good news is that we now have a good "drinking" cellar (meaning that this is NOT to impress a collector-we intend to drink everything we have bought). So if prices are too high or we do not like what is in the market, we can drink out of the cellar until things change.

This is what works in my house. Obviously, very subjective.

 

[BigJ]

The biggest jump in wine quality is between the bad cheap wines and the good cheap wines. Once you get away from the $4 swill, pay a few $$$ more and find the RIGHT $10 wine, you aren't that far away from wine greatness. And if you are willing to pay $15-20, you can find plenty of world class wines. For $40, you can drink some of the best wine the world has ever seen.

What the $100-$500-$? wines have going for them is usually a combination of Brand name, rarety, and demand. From a purely quality point of view, you are unlikely to get a wine for $100 that is much, if any, better than a top quality bottle for somewhere in the $20-$50 range. Good wine is good wine. It's the MAKING that makes it so, not the name or the price. Wealth can help a lot, but it's not the end-all.

If you drank nothing costing more than $30, but chose them well, you'd drink better than most people who depended on pricepoint.

Andre

+1. Yes indeed!! That is precisely why we subscribe to Wine Spectator (not as a bible but for ideas). In blind tastings (cover the label) I have seen $10-20 wines come off better than wines costing 10x as much.