Imagine you’re standing in the well stocked wine aisle of your local grocery, staring at the evening’s offerings. You might glance down at the bottom row, see the $5 jugs and start thinking about “bang for the buck”. Or, your eyes might flick up to the top row of anti-theft bottles with triple digit prices and wonder what type of person would pay that much for something that isn’t gold plated or come with air conditioning.
For a normal, once a week bottle, I usually find that $10-$15 is the sweet spot which is pleasant enough to drink but not so much that I worry about the cost. On rare occasions, I may splurge up to $40 a bottle but spending more than that is usually the province of company credit cards.
What’s (1) your preferred price range for a typical bottle and (2) the most you’ll pay out of pocket for a once-in-a-while bottle?
I don’t drink wine very often, and purchase even less. But when I do (or did), I went for the big jug of carlo rossi. Just a wee bit better than boxed wines.
$10-$15 is about right. If we buy a 30 bottle, it's because they're running a "Buy one, get a second for .05" sale at Bevmo. Of course, if wine is the beverage on a warm summer day, I’ll grab a jug of Carlo Rossi Paisano or Gallo Hearty Burgundy and make sangria.
I get my more expensive stuff from the wine clubs I’m in. For every day drinking, the above works out pretty well (that’s a Safeway, with their nice, club discount; add 20% for standard retail at a liquor store).
I keep my eyes within a couple of bucks of $15 for daily use. These are NYC prices, but I nearly always buy by the case, for a 10-15% discount. For special occasions, the sky’s the limit, depending on the occasion. (To be honest, never paid more than $100 for a single bottle)
Given interstate tax levels, I rarely drink west coast wines – some of which I love – because value-for-money is better with French, Italian, and Spanish imports. If I’m in California, Oregon, or Washington though, don’t get in between me and the “local” shelves.
One of the reasons for starting this thread was remembering a guy who once told me he never bought anything less than $100 a bottle. At the time, I thought the guy was an idiot but it did make me wonder if I’m just cheap. Based on the responses, it seems like $10-15 is pretty normal.
$9 for a bottle of Coppola Claret at Costco, once in a rare while. I used to go to TJ’s every week for a few bottles of their Two-Buck Chuck, but that didn’t turn out so good in the long run. I mostly stick to beer these days.
The $15 range is about right for me here in the US, which equates to wine selling for 5 euro range when there. The US is obsessed with charging too much.
Just checked with the wife; we paid $100 exactly once and were “Y’know, this isn’t appreciably better than a $50 bottle.”
Plus or minus $10 was our norm until our late 20s, when we decided we were good enough to upgrade to $15. I assumed by this time in our lives we’d be drinking a $50 bottle every night, at least. Nah, still around $15.
Also, in France, a cheap supermarket wine is often better than a fancy bottle exported to the U.S. and selling here for over $25.
Remember than wine is still a “luxury item” in America, not a generally accepted part of daily life. After all these years and all those immigrants, we’re still not used to it yet.
The wines we consistently like and drink are in the $6-and-change for whites (Chateau Saint Michelle, sometimes Hogue) and $12-ish for reds (Chateau Saint Michelle, The Expedition).
We’ve spent nearly thirty on a bottle of pinot noir for a special occasion. We like our cheapies so much that it isn’t really a thing these-a-days, though.
Honestly, for everyday drinking, I’m fine with the $5 or $6 Yellowtail or Barefoot. At that price range, I generally buy white. That said, for special occasions, I don’t really go above $50 a bottle. I enjoy wine, but it’s a cheap drink for me.
That’s the excuse I make for why New York State wines taste like goat piss.
“So the country is 241 years old, but there was a 14 year period where you couldn’t make wine legally, so everybody in New York completely forgot how to do it, and haven’t managed to re-learn over the past 83 years. Yeah. That’s the ticket.”
My every week wine is $10-20. Once a month I splurge and do $40. I’ve tried $80 and I didn’t like the result even compared to the $40 but would be willing to give it another go if the description sounded right.
