How much do you spend on a bottle of wine?

Fat Cat

For me the law of diminishing returns applies with wine.

I normally spend between 5-10 pounds on a bottle of wine and have enjoyed some extremely good ones that certainly do not taste flat.

I have also spent more (40 pounds) and found them uninspiring.

Often the nicest wines come from smaller vineyards that are not well known but have older vines with a lower yield and much richer fruit, but which for some technical reasons do not pass the strict classification rules and so do not sell for as much.

For value it is hard to beat some of the Chilean Sauvignons, Argentinian Malbecs or Aussie Shiraz's in my opinion.

I tend to like my reds big and dark with black fruits and oak. At the sort of money I spend I find the French wines mostly uninspiring.

I think what you get if you pay more is more consistency, but no guarantee it will be to your taste.

If you only pay a fiver and do not like it you simply chalk it up as one to leave alone and try another. $100 is a lot to pay if you do not like it and, after all, it is a matter of taste. I think there is a lot of snobbishness about wine, but the bottom line is, if you like it it's good, if you don't like it, it's bad.

Regards

Mark

About £6:00 except on special occasions. I think a few bottles of Tyskie or Lech represent at least an equal pleasure for £1:30 per half litre...

Fredrik

It was an alloyed experience to attend a wine tasting In Melbourne a few years back and find myself able to rank what were admittedly quite widely-spaced wines in ascending order of cost without error.

Similarly, I had always thought myself immune to the charms of champagne until a friend was gifted a rather special bottle and offered to share it with me. I said quality would be wasted on me, but he insisted. I was wrong. It was fabulous - massively removed from anything of my past experience.

I am British, and thus mean as buggery. I would set my ceiling at about £10 a bottle for an immediate purchase though I do have a few pricier cases in a warehouse awaiting release. They were bought as a specific investment and do not form part of a generalisable purchasing policy. At least I know what i'm missing most of the time.

Fraser

£10 - £25 depending on the occasion/quality on offer.

Steve

£5 to £35 depending on the occasion.

I buy Berry Bros & Rudd's "House Red" at £4.50 per bottle for everyday drinking with dinner. It follows a nice Bordeaux style.

I buy BBR's "Burgundy" at £8.96 per bottle for routine dinner/BBQ with guests eg close family and street neighbours at the weekend. They obviously have the choice of the House Red or the Burgundy. I also use the BBR Burgundy myself as an alternate to their House Red when I feel a bit more flushed with cash.

I buy BBR Nuits St George at about £18 per bottle for special occasions with family and neighbours. And for drinking myself with dinner when i'm feeling really relaxed about funds. (hardly ever!)

We use other Nuits St Georges up to £35 per bottle for extra special occasions. eg Xmas/new Year/milestone birthdays and aniversaries.

The quality and taste are consistent and improve with price, but even the House Red is excellent.

For white I ussually put out Blue Nun at £3 per bottle (or some other German Reisling/Nurstein/Peisport etc at the same sort of price) and a Puilly Fume at about £10 per bottle.

Cheers

Don

Nothing more than a fiver.

Wine and hi-fi share the same diminishing returns and there comes a point where you are kidding yourself.

i have gotten very used to drinking Ch Margaux 1998 which for a while have been able to get from a shop near where i work in Copenhagen. however, last few times i have been there, the wine wasnt there so i am kicking myself for not getting a few bottles stocked for christmas. price equivalent of 10 pounds per bottle -- very good stuff.

every now and then i try Amarone from Tescos at about 10 pounds as well, but i can easily go off it as it can be too "sweet" and tend towards fortified.

tesco also used to do quite a good McLaren Vale Coonawara 2001, for more or less 10 pounds, but again, i havent seen this in my local one for a while.

i havent been too lucky with Nuits St George, but tesco's may not be the place to look for a good one.

enjoy
ken

Used to chase the bargains in Sainsbury's/Tesco's but we have now found a Sauvignon Blanc, Casa Leona from Chile which we love at £5.49 a bottle, currently on offer for about £4.49. Its available from M & S. Generally don't pay more than £6 as a couple of bottles usually disappear in one session.

Would pay around £20 for a bottle of champers for a special occasion.

Regards

Diccus

For me wine is like hi-fi. Find a good dealer, explain what you like and listen to (or drink maybe) their recommendations.

Here is my favourite local dealer http://www.barthod.fr/


Nigel

I am still struggling to find a better slug than Chasseaur from Waitrose at £2.99, sadly a lot of people know this secret so they run out real quick when it comes in.

completely agree with you nigel i refuse to pay more than a fiver its against my religion!!
but seriously after a few glasses do you really care?
scotty

quote:

Originally posted by garyi:
I am still struggling to find a better slug than Chasseaur from Waitrose at £2.99, sadly a lot of people know this secret so they run out real quick when it comes in.

A few more know now don't they?

quote:

Nothing more than a fiver.

Wine and hi-fi share the same diminishing returns and there comes a point where you are kidding yourself.

Hi Nigel,

That may be true, but it doesn't happen at a fiver any more that Hi Fi diminishing returns start at a grand.

Steve

quote:

but seriously after a few glasses do you really care?
scotty

Scotty,

Does that mean you bung in a Musical Fidelity and after a few CDs you don't care?

If you can't tell the difference you obviously don't bother. Hi Fi forums are the wrong place to suggest that small differences don't matter.

Steve

"Nothing more than a fiver.

Wine and hi-fi share the same diminishing returns and there comes a point where you are kidding yourself."

I agree with the diminishing returns bit, but disagree with the kidding yourself bit, based on personal experience.

You can get a very nice wine for under a fiver, and I really do enjoy mine. And I certainly enjoy my Alpine cd/tuner in the car with Mac Audio speakers, total cost £500.

If i could afford to always buy the Nuits St George at £35 a bottle I would. Is it seven times as nice? very subjective, but I know which I prefer.

My LP12/Ekos/Akiva/Lingo/Linto;CDS2/CDPS;52/sc/135;Wilsons would cost something like £35k new. Is it 70 (yes 70, not 7)times as good as the in-car Alpine? very subjective. But I know which one I prefer to listen to.

Cheers

Don

I don't want to get into an old hat argument with Nigel or anyone else, but I do not think that assessing £5 as the limit beyond which wine constitutes diminishing returns is particularly fair or true.

As a general rule, in the UK any wine at £4.99 or less has been made to "fit" its price point, whilst wines above £5 are by and large priced according to how good* they are. $9.99 is a similar figure in the States.

It is possible to spend far, far more than this producing a bottle of wine. For example, last vintage, the price of a kilo of Grand Cru grapes in Champagne was €10, meaning that the fruit alone (it takes 1.5kg) in a bottle of decent Champagne accounts for about £10.
Which is why Champagne is expensive and why £10 Champagne tastes like wallpaper paste, if you're lucky

As some of you may know I work in wine, so have the opportunity to taste, judge and drink a heck of a lot, including some with frankly scary price tags, if they have prices at all.
One of the highlights of the last twelve months for me was the opportunity to try a Beaune 1er Cru Clos des Feves 1929 - possibly the greatest vintage in Burgundy ever. Were such a thing to be put up for sale at an auction, it would probably fetch £500 or so. Which I wouldn't pay - but that's mainly because there are things I'd rather spend £500 on, and such a sum is a huge amount to me. I would however pay around £200 for a bottle of it - simply because it tasted that good. The most I have ever spend on a bottle of wine is £120 (in a restaurant), and that was worth it too.
I wouldn't spend £13k on a cd player for that matter, but I wouldn't criticise people who do. It's all relative, isn't it?

Having said all that, it's important to drink inexpensive wines in order to appreciate the really good ones when they come along I think. My hi-fi seems to sound better after hearing a tinny radio...

Cheers

Rod

*good in this context = saleable, or whatever you want it to mean I suppose.

Hi Rod,

Agreed. By and large you get what you pay for and make your own decisions about where diminishing returns kicks in.

Bit like Hi Fi eh?

Steve

£5 is my limit generally speaking.

That is not to say that diminishing returns apply immediately significantly beyond that point.

But is something 60 times the price 60 times "better"? Well that ultimately is a personal decision.

steve,
i was talking about wine for me personally and thats the thread wine not hi-fi . of course i love my system -it plays music very well. as for wine i like a tipple with my meal but much prefer beer. and thats why i personally would not bother to pay out a lot for a good wine when i enjoy a cheaper bottle just as much.
and this is a forum so i and everyone else can express their opinions.
scotty

These are my 2 extremes:
The first I bought at the co-op, found it was extremely drinkable for £3.49 so bought a case for everyday use.
The other is the other end of what I like.
You get 4 decent glasses of wine out of a bottle, 6 small glasses. You'd think nothing of paying £2.80 a pint in a pub. Add it up to what isn't too much for a bottle.

Wouldn't want to give it to Nigel if he wouldn't appreciate it.

Rasher

That Shiraz looks right up my street.

Mark

Nice topic. £10 is my max for a bottle of red wine. Having said so, a nice bottle of Marquis de Caceres - Rioja (avoid Reserva 1998 AT ALL COST!) £8.79 from the wine shop along Old Compton St in Soho is my "special occasion" wine purchase albeit haven't been there for quite a while now.

I'm a BIG fan of Spanish red wine. My cheap personal favoutire at the moment is a bottle of tempranillo from Tesco price very nicely at £3.11 on the Spanish red section. I usually buy them all off the shelves.

Affordable to use them for cooking as well unlike those really nasty "table wine" for cooking at similar price range.

UK is a rip-off for wine. You can buy a very fine bottle of red wine in normal supermarket in Spain for €5 - €10 where it's equivalent to a £15 +++ here.

Salud!

Rasher

OK, give me the wine and I will gladly tell you what I think of it.

As I posted earlier I feel £5-10 is the optimal price bracket for value for money wine and there are some very nice wines available in this price range. If you go higher in price there tends to be less risk that you will find a bad one but no guarantee they will always be better. I think that if you go lower you need to drink an awful lot of bottles to find one that isn't plonk.

I get my wine from here and find that value for money is excellent as they have already done most of the sorting for you and getting a bottle of plonk is rare.

The tasting notes also help to select the wines that are likely to suit your palate.

Regards

Mark