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Secrets of the Savvy Shopper
Tom Ryder, chairman of the Reader's Digest Association and co-owner of The Cookhouse restaurants in Connecticut, has been a wine aficionado for decades. He's been lucky enough to taste many stellar wines in some of the finest wine regions of the world. Now he brings his expertise to RD.com as he shares Part 1: Summer Wines from his new column on Great Wine Bargains. Ryder will add to these wines each season, so it will grow and become a useful searchable database.It doesn't take a lot of knowledge or skill to walk into a wine store and pick out a great wine. Just show them your money. Good wines from the best wine regions in good years regularly cost more than $100 per bottle these days, and the best can cost three to six times that much. Dinner at a nice restaurant often costs less than the price of the wine. What's wrong with this picture? Quite a bit, actually, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Here's a secret: If you are a savvy shopper, you can regularly find wines that are relatively close to the "fine" wines in quality -- at a fraction of the cost. But you have to be smart, because it's tough out there. A veritable sea of swill beckons your hard-earned cash. A typical medium-sized wine store has 1,000 to 2,000 bottles of wine, and 60 to 70 percent of those cost less than $15. Are all of them great? No. Finding a great wine bargain (GWB) is like looking for a pecan in a bowl of peanuts. If you try to taste your way to success, you will discover that maybe one in ten is good enough for you to take it home, and maybe one in 50 is what you would consider a "great wine bargain." Now do the math. It cost you $150 to find the good bottle and $500 to find the GWB. Plus a headache. And your time. Maybe you should have just bought the expensive wine to start with. But we'll fix that.
We start with a network of experts: wine professionals, restaurateurs or experienced tasters whose palates we know and trust. Then we buy the wines they recommend and taste them against one another. We require that they retail for $15 or less and that they be widely available around the country, so we don't have you looking in frustration for some little gem that made it to only five stores in all of the United States. The best wines from this process make it to Ryder's List. They are GWBs. By the way, not many do, which narrows our list of friends and experts!
The wines we've chosen below are summer wines. Wines to drink for a day at the beach, on a picnic or at a barbecue. These are wines to be shamelessly enjoyed, not saved or cellared or pondered. Most are very different from each other but have two things in common: They are absolutely delicious and each is a GWB. Enjoy and let us know what you think. Or tell us what you didn't like. But at least give us credit for drinking an enormous amount of wine strictly on your behalf.
A final word about availability: You may not find every wine in your favorite store, but you should be able to find them at another store in your town. Or your merchant can order them for you. If that fails, search the Internet. They are there.
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