Most isn’t. Champagne and Moscato d’Asti are a couple of exceptions.
And, apparently, I forgot champagne was wine. Moscato d’Asti is new to me though.
2nd this suggestion. This one is good slightly chilled, too.
Also, maybe try a Reisling with some blue cheese. It’s one of those combinations that just kind of does the “happy dance” in your mouth.
Does “chilled” mean “keep it in the refrigerator”?
Yes. But some wines should be left to sit out a bit before serving, not served right out of the fridge. The Menage a Trois is one of those, the Reisling is better cold.
In that case I would suggest you treat yourself and pick up a bottle, chill it, and sip it along with some Pecan Sandies or other type of shortbread cookie. They really do go exceptionally well together.
Dang! It’s cold outside and I’ve got nothing goin’ on. I just may have to go pick up a bottle tonight myself.
Yes.
Or in a bucket of ice if you’re doing the James Bond thing with a bottle of bubbly at the table. 
Also, reds should be chilled in the fridge for 20-25 minutes or so before opening. The ‘room temperature’ spoken of with regard to reds actually pertains to room temperature as it existed in Europe before central hear and air. Most do well at about 58 to 60 degrees.
Oh, yeah, and speaking of Cherry2000’ssuggestion about Reisling and bleu cheese, you might also want to try a bottle of port or sherry with some bleu cheese, walnuts and apples. YUM!
(Sandeman Founder’s Reserve Porto is good and a bottle will run you only about $21 to $26. It’s my favorite ‘everyday’ port.
Sorry, posting in haste while busy with other things. The above was meant for tr0psn4j.
el cheapo wine is (almost) always going to be horrible. Sure you can find a 10 dollar chilean/argentinian/south african wine that is drinkable, but it won’t be nice and you shouldn’t try to cultivate a taste for it.
As some people said, a sweet german wine might work for you, but since you like cider, I also recommend a really fruity white, for example, a New Zealand, Marlborough Estate, Sauvignon Blanc. Around 20 dollars a bottle I guess and a very drinkable, extremely fruity, drop.
But if you want to taste what wine should taste like, wait until you can afford it and go to a top tier french restraunt and tell the waiter/sommelier you want to spend about 150 dollars on a bottle and ask for his recommendation about what would go well with your meal. I myself can’t afford to do this very often, but when I can it’s a real experience!
Except that that same $150 bottle of wine in a restaurant only costs 50 bucks or less in a wine shop.
This is not good advice for a beginner who would definitely be better off starting off with a perfectly approachable $10 bottle of wine, wherever it is from.
Ok, that’s true. If you know a wine shop where you can trust the staff to select a good bottle for you, by all means take that route.
I agree (assuming the OP isn’t looking to begin his journey into oenophiledom with $150 bottles of wine). There are many perfectly good wines in the $6 to $10 range that are quite suitable for everyday table use.
I would advise the OP to go to a bookstore and pick up a copy of Wine Spectator magazine which samples and reviews a wide variety of wines. Many good wines in this price range can be found there, often with higher ratings than others costing three to five times as much.
There’s also a huge difference between commercial and home-made wines. My father started with wine kits and moved on to making red, white and rose wines from scratch. No matter the source material or sweet/dryness they all had the same characteristics of;
No ‘afterburn’ in the mouth. No chemical or cardboard taste (cheap and nasty wines often have one or the other) and - most important - no hangover - maybe a bit tired or thirsty, but no pounding headache. My mother and I have researched this last aspect on many occasions and will carry on in the name of science to repeat the experiment as often as we can.
I didn’t enjoy reds until Dad started making his - until then I’d only enjoyed sweet whites which now taste like lemonade, bad lemonade. Icky icky horrible cloyingly sweet lemonades.
You’re off to a good start though, for some people a nice rose can be the stepping stone between whites and reds, but you could try for a nice shiraz (aka syrah) with a meat dish. As an analogy, Shiraz is lamb - Merlot is venison.
For interest, Dad’s now onto other fruit wines, we’re waiting for the tamarillo to clear. Waiting with glasses ready.
Yeah, most of the wines you find in the liquor stores are going to be grape-based. However, my husband and I own some rental properties out in WV and on our way out to there, we pass http://www.wvwines.com/wines/index.html this place. We almost always stop and pick up a bottle or two. If you scroll to the bottom of their wine list page, you’ll find wines made from blueberry, blackberry, apple, pear and more. And they will let you taste anything on their list.
They also, tangentially, make some very nice liqueurs, only instead of being maybe 20 proof like the liqueurs you find in liquor stores, they’re 80 proof! They’ll let you taste those, too, but limit it to three tastings per customer, as if you sample all of them, you’re likely to leave drunk!
Before my escalating migraine-susceptibility put the kibosh on my alcohol consumption, my wife and I were pretty serious wine drinkers. Strangely, we got into it through the Wine of the Month Club. It’s corny, but in fact fairly educational for the beginner. They send you two wines each month, along with suggested recipes and information about the wine. We were members for about a year, and then cancelled and started buying our own. It was a good way to get acquainted with the different types of wine, and find out what you like.
For us, buying good wines was made easiest by finding a wine reviewer (in our case, Robert Parker) who had tastes similar to our own (dark, rich reds) and reading his reviews. But first you have to find what you like.
You might want to try hard cider from Normandy (I like the stuff from Eric Bordelet), or ice cider if you’re looking for a dessert wine. (Ice cider is analogous to icewine, except it’s made from apples.)
I had a bit of White Zinfandel the other night. It wasn’t bitter or horrible, but it just tasted somewhat lousy, much in the way a light beer is drinkable, but still not good. I forget the brand, but it was in a cardboard box, so I assume it wasn’t very pricey.
Speaking of pricey, aside from vintage, what exactly differentiates a $150 bottle of wine from a $5 bottle? Are some grape-smashing methods especially pricey? Nobody sells $150 bottles of grape juice.
I’ll have to try that. The last hard cider I had was from a dispensing machine in St. Petersburg, and it wasn’t very good.
Several years ago I had the best glass of apple cider at a Georgian restaurant in Russia. It was a thick, opaque green and I’m pretty certain it was frothy. I’m also almost certain it began to separate (almost like milk and cream) after sitting for a while, but I wonder if I’m misremembering. It didn’t taste at all alcoholic. Anybody know what that was? It was delicious.
In a nutshell, yes, some methods are especially pricey. The most obvious being the hand harvesting and several passes or tries of the grapes used to make Sauternes. Viticultural and winemaking practices will of course determine the final price of a wine.
New French oak? American oak? Hungarian oak? Stainless steel? How long are they aged? The longer it’s being aged, the more overhead will be factored in.
Land, labor, packaging, distribution, and fashion all contribute to cost. The latter contributing heavily to many of those ‘cult’ wines that are low on supply and high on demand. (Think Screaming Eagle and Harlan Estate.)
Former fine wine salesman chiming in:
I want to dispell a couple notions that seem to be cropping up, and Isamu, this isn’t directed personally towards you.
First of all, there’s a common misconception about sweet wines being inferior in general and Rieslings in particular. Yes, there are oceans of cheap, sweet swill out there (your white zins/Asti Spumantes), but just because a wine is sweet isn’t necessarily an indicator of it’s quality or lack thereof.
Rieslings are one of the world’s greatest (and oldest) wine varieties, and they are vinified in a plethora of styles, from very dry (trocken) to very sweet (trockenbeerenauslese). Do yourself a favor here: pick up a bottle of a Mosel or Rheingau Riesling, try producers like Selbach-Oster, Dr Thanisch, Schloss Vollrads or if you really want to drop some coin, a Donhoff. Try something in the Spatlese level of sweetness, which is a term that indicates when the grapes are picked (in this case, slightly overripe, or “late-picked”, meaning extra sugar in the juice).
Good Rieslings are great because they are balanced. If they are sweet, they are going to have a sharp acid cut to keep the wine from feeling “fat” in the mouth, a trait that also makes Rieslings good with food, especially spicy food (like Thai food) or salty cheeses.
There isn’t a good way to describe the euphoria I associate with drinking an excellent Riesling. Wet-stone minerality, apricot, peachy, flint, tinges of floral aromas…man, a good Mosel riesling is just awesome.
Another thing (I need to wrap this up quickly) is the notion that good wines cannot be had cheaply. What a load of BS. Unfortunately, this is also a perception issue as well as an exposure one, because there are many terrible cheap wines out there. You kind of just have to know your producers/regions or have a knowledgable salesperson at a reputable wine retailer guide you.
Chile and Argentina are good places to start for inexpensive good wines, but good, inexpensive wines are available in countless regions and in many styles and grape varieties.
My best advice is to keep trying wines, some of which you will not like, in order to define what styles and grap varieties you like, and then you can hone in on being able to try new wines that you have a better chance at liking because you will have educated your mind and palate about certain wine varietals.
I’ll end with a short list of some of my favorite producers:
Cline (CA), Seghesio(CA), Chateau Souvrain(CA), Grgich(Ca), Dr Thanisch(Germany), Catena (Argentina), Selbach-Oster(Germany), Donnhoff (Germany), Jackson Estate (NZ), Edmunds St John (CA). I have to stop, there are many more.
My favorite types of wine are Rieslings, Red Zinfandels, Pinot Noirs, Rhone Valley red wines (Chateauneuf du Pape), Sauvignon Blancs and Champagnes.
To take FoieGrasIsEvil’s second paragraph a little further:
Rule 1: Drink what YOU like. Don’t let any wine snob or nouveau riche asshole tell you that there’s something wrong with drinking white zinfandel or muscat wine. If you like it, drink it.
Rule 2: Don’t assume that because you got a bottle of style X, that all bottles are like that. Wine seems to be one of the most variable of products- vintage, geography, brand, method, storage, price point, etc… all figure into the taste. Frequently the same variety of grapes vinted in a different area will taste drastically different. Compare a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc with a California one and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Or, try a cheapo Pinot Noir, and then spend the money on something like an Etude Pinot Noir; they’re so far apart, you’d think they’re different styles.
Rule 3: In my opinion the best way to figure out what you like is to keep a journal. Yes, it sounds silly, but if you don’t keep a journal, you’ll probably have trouble remembering exactly which wine was heavenly, and which one seemed like purple battery acid.
Yes, a journal’s a great idea.
There is a huge difference between wines from different growers and areas, but I can usually tell I’m drinking a Merlot, no matter where it’s from or what it’s price. Getting there with Shiraz. Don’t care enough for other styles to get to know them that well.
Sanders, careful with the boxed wines, some of them are watered down which drastically affects the taste.
Norinew, Dad got into wine-making after a trip through Nelson where there’s a similar attitude of “It’s organic, we’ll try it!” - it’s where we first discovered apple wine. We’ve also got a couple of places locally that seem similar to your linked site. One of them also makes fudge which I must try whenever I’m out there because it’s so yummy, and fudge is the lowest item on my sweet food chain.