Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [99]
From my years working with wine-buying consumers in both retail and restaurant settings, I find that people buy in one of three ways, depending on the situation:
The “Go- to List.” This is your personal short list of a few classic styles that you know well and buy often. They’re generally sure things, and priced accordingly, so you buy them for important occasions. My own short list includes French Champagne and a few favorite Pinot Noirs, Sauvignon Blancs, Rieslings, and red Bordeaux.
Theme buying. Whether it’s the local specialty, a carafe of the house wine in a French bistro or a Tuscan trattoria, summer whites for a backyard barbecue, or a reasonably priced sparkler for a big New Year’s blast, sometimes the context for the wine guides your choice.
Bargain hunting. I firmly believe that the rest of the time, people are simply looking for deals, both in stores and restaurants, though they’re sometimes embarrassed to admit it for fear of looking cheap.
Don’t be shy. Getting a good deal is where we’re going to start.
How to Find Wine Values
Everyone wants value, regardless of their budget. Buyers of expensive wines expect tremendous quality and pleasure from them, and rightly so. But we’ve learned two important things about the price-to-quality relationship in wine that are worth restating. First, a wine’s quality assessment and pleasure potential are personal, and a critic’s highly rated wine might not be to your taste. And then you have to remember that the prices reflect everything from the winery’s marketing objectives to critical acclaim, production cost, and supply and demand, just like any other consumer product—so they don’t give you a value “number” either. It would not be possible to do so, because value is completely subjective.
That said, there’s always joy in finding a good wine for a low price, and not least is the thrill factor. Everyone loves discoveries and deals (“Think how much money I saved—so I bought two!”). And many times, what’s quirky and full of character—like a vintage jacket in the secondhand store or a great barbecue joint that only the locals know about—is as satisfying as the tried-and-true, prestigious, and expensive, if not more so.
I choose wine for several hundred Target stores, but that’s not my job. My job is to make sure the wines sell, and that guests are pleased with what they bought and what they spent for it. Here is my strategy for finding deals, and it will work for you, too, in both stores and restaurants:
Buy the stuff most other people aren’t buying. This is a notion we have covered before—branching out from plain vanilla into new territories of taste. Wine professionals sometimes call this ABC-land—Anything But Chardonnay (or Cabernet Sauvignon)—where the wines often give better value for the money because they have to, in order to compete with the better-known styles. Aside from the price advantage in this strategy, there’s another major benefit of which few are aware. Any restaurant or wine shop with a reasonably thoughtful selection puts heart and soul into sourcing the very best stuff in this category of unique, ignored and therefore value-priced wine styles. (When we professional wine buyers get together, we commiserate over how some customers are scared off by the “cheap” prices of many of these lovely wines. If you’re among that crowd, you’re missing out, big time, on great deals.)
Following is my list of the categories where you’re most likely to find great value for the money.
Whites
RIESLING Yes, here it is again. And you know where the excellent ones come from. The Old World classics are from Alsace, France (the driest and fullest), and Germany (fruity and more delicate). The best New World versions come from New Zealand, Australia, and the United States (somewhere in between Germany and Alsace, and more fruit-forward). If