News about cheap wine from the cyber-ether, as part of 2013 $10 Hall of Fame celebration:
• How to buy cheap wine: This older post from the Brooklyn Guy Loves Wine blog offers some outstanding advice, including this: “Its excellence must derive from the smell and taste of the wine, and from its expression of place, not from the mere fact that it is palatable and costs $10.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. The only drawback? He recommends Chambers, one of the great wine retailers in the world, for its cheap wine selection, and 99 percent of us will never get a chance to shop there.
• These people make cheap wine: The Wine Spectator, of all places, has a two-parter about four winemakers who make wine that I write about. It’s a bit sloggy to get through, but worth the effort if only for the technical information one doesn’t see much elsewhere. At Chateau Ste. Michelle, for example, wine is produced in two facilities, using 82,574 barrels and 475 stainless-steel tanks. Some of the tanks hold as much as 380,000 bottles of wine.
• Seal of approval: Eater, a very au courant website for people who call themselves foodies, has decided that cheap wine is in. Jordan Mackay, who writes for San Francisco magazine, reports that "it's never been a better time to be a cheap wine drinker. Maybe I've just been bludgeoned for too long into thinking I needed to spend more for decent quality and interest. Spending less on wine makes me happy on its own, but the fact that often times I actually prefer the unadorned, straightforward, and open nature of such wines makes it a win-win.” Shocking news, no?
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