Advice on Everyday, Value Wines?

Many thanks again, Andrew. Every good worker deserves a fair wage. I hope smaller wineries (and the grape sellers behind them) will all be able to hold their own in healthy competition with big businesses. Surely the marketplace is a large enough pond for fish of all sizes.

When music recordings hit the market after the World Wars, at first there was concern that attendance at concerts might suffer. But in the long run it's worked the other way. Masses of people who had never had access to fine music got interested. Let's hope the finest wineries too are lifted by the wave as many people who once considered wine a dispensable luxury discover they can have it after all within an average budget.

As I look at my own tasting pattern over the last year and a half, I see approximately:
$0-6///34%
$6-9///27%
$9-12///25%
$12-15///9%
$15+///5%

So I seem to have been mirroring the national curve roughly, with slightly smaller percentages on the extreme ends. But now I do have to find ways to scale back at the center. Most of those purchases were bottles. Boxes for everyday may be a large part of the answer.

Two very good everyday wines that I can get in Florida at about your price point are:

Clos de Torribas Tempranillo Crianza from the Penedes region in Spain.

Altos Las Hormigas Malbec from Mendoza, Argentina

Both are in wide distribution and neither are going broke.

If you can't find these specific wines I would see what's available near you from Spain and Argentina. Both countries are producing very good wines at very low prices.

Thanks, Ken. You're fortunate to find crianza for such a modest tab. I haven't seen either of those particular labels yet here on the plains, but the imported tempranillo, garnacha, macabeo/viura, and torrontes wines I've been able to find have offered remarkable quality for the price, and were more interesting than many of the low-end domestic products in the same bracket.

Many wineries make "kitchen sink", "house wine" wines which are pretty good. Last night I opened a 2009 Friends from Pedroncelli. A blend of Merlot, Syrah, Sangiovese and Zin, it was a delish, smooth, fun wine. I can drink it with anything It is $11/bottle, cheaper if you buy it by the case and cheaper even still if you are a club member.
-Shaji

Thanks, Shaji. I hadn't thought of "kitchen sink" wines as a category. But now that you mention it, after the turn of the year I bought a rather mysterious wine at Cost Plus World Market called "Cornucopia California White Wine" out of Healdsburg, giving no information on the labels about the grape varieties used to make it up. (I think I saw a red blend too in the shop under the same name.) Google searches turned up no such company. I suspect it was a one-off product made from surplus grapes by a reputable winery. Very nice it was, and right in my price window.

Yes, this is a good approach. Do the research to find out which wineries you like also have second labels. Many of the wines under those labels over-perform in the price range they compete. We have a second label to use up our press wine from our white wine production. Same idea. At least here you are buying in the normal flow of production, and not based on stressed sale prices. It will be more work, but it can yield good, repeatable results. Good luck and keep us posted with what you find.

I'd be more than happy to do some research on surplus wines, but haven't any idea where to begin. A winery's website usually doesn't announce the names of its secondary labels. And the labels don't claim a winery. The big retailers where I, as a consumer, find the wines don't answer my e-mail inquiries. I've got nowhere searching for the origins of that "Cornucopia." Maybe a government record somewhere? But I'll look for it again around the turn of the year!

One option is to go to your local wine shop and ask which of the top brands they carry have a second label. Often, there are people in the know in those sort of places. My 10 cents.

After some searching I did in fact find some limited information about certain second-label wines on blogs. Here are a few.

http://www.secondlabelwine.com/index.html
http://discover.winecountry.com/wine/2009/03/second-label-standouts-1.html
http://www.imbibemagazine.com/Great-Budget-Friendly-Wines-A-Guide-to-Second-Labels
http://bagtheweb.com/b/HOjKoi

And, from WineLoversPage's own columnist Taylor Eason last year:
http://www.tayloreason.com/corkscrew/archives/sour-grapes-hardly-second-label-wines-are-bargains-by-design/.

None of the labels listed on these pages is available where I shop, and most of them are still a bit above my favored price range of $4-7, but the info might be helpful to others.

October - November, I've found, is an especially good time of year to frequent the shops, as last year's wines are moved off the shelves to make room for new ones, and put on clearance. Better shops will move their merchandise along in an "autumn sale." Bulk-produced budget wines may be past their peak after a year. But sometimes one can find a finer wine, with still some aging potential, for 2/3 or even 1/2 price. This last week I've found a 2009 Da Vinci Chianti marked down from $14 to $7, and a local Frontenac down from about $13 to $7.