Cheap wines of quality

Freiheit

Hi all just home from Tesco and browsing their wines. So many cheap but frequently in the past I found many to be of poor quality. I brought home with a heavy consciene El Chuqaro for E4.25. Could we maybe start a sticky where various wines,perhaps also beers are reviewed?. Purchase then might not feel like such a gamble?.

For the record the best cheapish wine I know of is Blossom Hill,available for just E5.75 in Fine Wines,more than E8 in Tesco.

Hope all are well!:)

Zowie

4ndroid

Liebfraumilch is quite nice and is cheap. Its sweet and mild and 8%.
Usually you will see Hock or Hoch or something like that sitting beside the liebfraumilch which is quite similar. Think theyre five euro a bottle

BeerNut

Freiheit wrote: »

Could we maybe start a sticky where various wines,perhaps also beers are reviewed?

Review stickies don't work (ever tried to actually use the pub guide here?)

TBH if you want a review of a beer or wine you're better off Googling it.

Freiheit

Ok,what are the problems with reviews though? Would be nice to have one specifcialy dedicated to what you'd find in an average Irish supermarket or off-licence. I'm not arguing,just wondering why you feel they don't work?:)

Very hard to know whether those cheap wines are any good,especially those for 4 or 5 Euro,sticky or not please let me know! ...Prost!:)

BeerNut

Freiheit wrote: »

Ok,what are the problems with reviews though?

A comment thread on a forum isn't an appropriate format for the information.

Say you review a wine and then it changes, or it stops being stocked. It's stuck there on the thread forever and only a mod can change or delete it.

Say several people review the same wine: chances are their reviews are spread across lots of different pages of the thread: that's going to be a pain for anyone who wants to find out about that particular wine.

These problems get worse the bigger the thread gets, and there are an awful lot of wines out there. If you want to know what to buy in the supermarket, a five-year-running 500-post thread is not what you need.

Blogs, wikis, and ratings websites all work well for storing and presenting this sort of information. Discussion forums don't.

Freiheit wrote: »

Very hard to know whether those cheap wines are any good

Have you tried Googling for information? That's what I do when I want to find out about beers. When I found myself struggling to remember whether or not I liked beers I'd tasted before, I started a blog to keep note of them.

MOHPremierWine

While the idea has merit, I think that each person has
a) different tastes
b) different opinions on what quality is
c) different perceptions of what 'cheap' is. (some people like to get 'better value for money' rather than a bottle for a fiver).

Another way that this might work on a discussion thread would be to choose one wine each week, and let anyone who wanted to take part in a 'virtual tasting' comment on it.

If you like French wines, I can highly recommend Domaine CaudeVal wines available in Molloys Liquor Stores at €7.49 a bottle. The Merlot is vibrant and really fruity (dark fruit) and a little spicy, with medium tannins.
The Sauvignon Blanc was named 'bottle of the week' in The Irish Times a few weeks ago. There is also a very good Chardonnay, and a Cabernet SAuvignon. The wines are made by a really good producer, with minimal chemicals/interference. Go try!

BeerNut

MOHPremierWine wrote: »

Another way that this might work on a discussion thread would be to choose one wine each week, and let anyone who wanted to take part in a 'virtual tasting' comment on it.

And if you look at the stickies, you'll see we have a failed one of those as well.

Slaphead07

Given excise duty/tax and transportation it's not really possible to get quality cheap wine. If you find you like a "cheap" bottle then great... enjoy. But it's unlikely to be genuine quality.
I'd certainly accept the notion of 'better value for money' but that's quite a different thing.

muckety

I'd agree with the last post, if you spend 5euro on a bottle of wine the value of the wine in the bottle is about 50cent but if you spend another 5 you get a wine thats many times better. I buy wine in tesco or m&s very occasionally, but usually go to a good wine shop as my tenner will get be a better bottle there.
That said - the M&S gold label wines are usually under a tenner and often you can get a good offer, like buy 6 and save 25% which puts them at about 7 euro a bottle, and another few like them.

BaZmO*

If you're only talking about a wine in the €5 range, it's hardly gonna break the bank to just buy a bottle and decide if you like it yourself.

Tastes differ, so you could have a 10 page thread of people saying how fantastic a particular wine is but when you buy and taste it yourself you just don't like it.

I could understand wanting to check reviews of really expensive wines as you want to at least have an idea of what you're getting, but inexpensive wines? Nah, just buy and decide yourself.

jjanderton

4ndroid wrote: »

Liebfraumilch is quite nice and is cheap. Its sweet and mild and 8%.
Usually you will see Hock or Hoch or something like that sitting beside the liebfraumilch which is quite similar. Think theyre five euro a bottle

Hi...

Liebfraumilch is a style of semi-sweet white color "German wine" which may be manufacture, generally for export purpose in the regions of Rheinhessen, Palatinate, Rheingau and Nahe.

Schmitt Sohne Liebfraumilch Qba, Rheinhessen, Germany price range is €5-6 and having 9-10% alc....

Regards J

Berwick

I would not call those wines "cheap".

I would call them "affordable" ... or something.

And affordable wines may taste just as well as those overprized wines for snobs.

---

But I cannot really recommend "Liebfraumilch" - affordable or not.

celticbest

Freiheit wrote: »

For the record the best cheapish wine I know of is Blossom Hill,available for just E5.75 in Fine Wines,more than E8 in Tesco.

J.C.'s in Swords sell Blossom Hill for €4.99.......

Slaphead07

Berwick wrote: »

And affordable wines may taste just as well as those overprized wines for snobs.

really? Leaving aside the juvenile notion that people who might appriciate wine could only be snobs I thnk it's worth pointing out that in a €5.99 bottle of wine there is 36c worth of actual wine. For all wines the cost of the bottle, labour, shipping, excise etc is the exact same. When you spend even a few euro more you're spending it on the wine.

izeult

Brown Brothers Chenin Blanc (Tesco €8) is my favourite. I would recommend to a friend.

Beruthiel

Berwick wrote: »

And affordable wines may taste just as well as those overprized wines for snobs.

I have been drinking wine for over 20 years now. I can assure you, the difference between a cheap bottle of plonk and a fine wine is VAST.
It has absolutely nothing to do with being a snob.
It has everything to do with the process of how a wine is made, the aging, the work that went into making it and finally, the result, the taste.
Considering the 1,000's of different wines which are made in a variety of different ways, it takes time to discover the kind that you personally like.
How is trying to find the perfect wine for you considered snobbery?