Buying wine

A friend of mine told me recently that he never pays less than $10.00 for a bottle of wine. He feels confident that if he pays at least $10.00, he'll get a good bottle of wine. Is he right? Of course the answer is, it depends on the bottle of wine he's buying for $10.00. Some ten dollar bottles are lousy, while others are great values.

That's not to say that price is meaningless. If I served you 20 wines in a blind tasting, 10 costing about $40 a bottle, and 10 costing around $10 a bottle, and then asked you to pick your 10 favorites wines from that group of 20, assuming you have a fairly well developed palate, you would probably choose maybe 8 from the $40 bottles, and 2 from the $10 bottles.

So obviously, when you're shopping for wine the trick is in knowing which $10 bottles to buy. And it changes from year to year, and from grape to grape. In California, 2005 was a great year for Chardonnay, but a bad year for Zinfandel (red). 2003 was a great year for Syrah. 2002 was one of the best years in two decades for Cabernet Sauvignon. It's like anything else: you have to do a lot of research. This year I travelled twice to Santa Barbara. Traditionally strong wineries like Cambria, Byron, Zaca Mesa, and Au Bon Climat released some very mediocre wines this past year (mostly 2004-2005 vintages). On the other hand, from the same region Foxen, Stolpman, Fess Parker and Beckmen had outstanding years. What I'm trying to say is that you really have to keep up with it to know what's going on in a given year.

One rule of thumb right now is that pinot noir is a bad buy almost across the board. Due to the popularity of the Sideways movie a glut of really bland, thin, insipid pinot noirs have flooded the market. Every winery looking to make a quick buck is planting pinot noir grapes, whether or not they have the right soil and/or climate to grow the grape. The result? A LOT of crappy wine out there selling fror $25 and up.

Syrah, on the other hand, especially from Califfornia's Central coast (Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, Paso Robles, Santa Ynez, etc) is an excellent value these days. I guarantee you that a $20 bottle from that area will be better than any $20 bottle of pinot noir right now.


One other point about buying wine: I almost never pay full retail price for wine. There's just no need to do so. Figure out what you want and look for those wines on sale. If it's a wine that you like buy several bottles at a time when it's on sale. Sometimes stores will put a wine on clearance because it's not selling well. Again, if you know you like the wine, stock up. Even if I'm trying a wine for the first time I still won't buy it if it's not on sale. Of course, I keep a lot of wine in stock at my house (I have an outside fridge as a wine "cellar"), so I never have to go out and buy a bottle ASAP, and I can afford to wait for sales.

Here's an example. I found a Castle Rock 2005 pinot noir on sale at Ralphs for the absurd price of $5. It normally sells for $13. This is not a wine I would have bought normally, but at that price I figured what the heck. It was actually quite good. Even at $13 it would have been good, but at $5 it was a steal.