NOT Your Two-Buck-Chuck
Last weekend, Laura and I discovered an “under $29” wine list at Myth, one of our favorite restaurants in San Francisco. The $25 Portugese red that we selected was terrific and renewed my interest in scrounging out low cost, high quality wines. The hype around California “name brand” producers seems to have no end, and the prices of California wines just keep climbing & climbing. Add a good Wine Spectator score, and you have a $40+ bottle of wine for sure (at a discounter), and 2-3x that for the same bottle at a restaurant. There’s nothing wrong with these wines – in fact, they are usually pretty darn good. But as the experience at Myth shows, you can get good wine for a lot less. At BevMo, I had a recent find of an Australian red with a Wine Spectator score of 90, priced at $18 per two bottles. That’s only $9 each for a WS90 wine, and the wine tasted great! The good finds are often wines that don’t have the Napa or Sonoma branding pushing the price up – look for wines from Chile, Australia, Spain, Portugal or from Paso Robles or Santa Cruz in California – and don’t be afraid of screw top caps!
– Chris