2005 Costano Solanera – $14

91 points Wine Spectator, 90 points Stephen Tanzer and Robert Parkers’ Spanish Wine Bargain under $20. Imported and custom blended by Eric Solomon, which is always a good sign, wines with Solomon’s name on the back label are usually a very good bet. A  red wine blend of 65% Monastrell, 20% Cabernet Sauvignon and 15% Tintorera sourced from the Yecla Region of Southern Spain, an up and coming wine region that does not have a trendy name yet. Unfiltered and unfined, ten months aged in oak.

The color is a dark plush deep blood red. The nose is smoke, red twizzlers and dry autumn leaves.  Big and chewy with noticeable but smooth tannins . Tastes of silky dark chocolate truffles with liqueur centers, figs and blueberries. The finish is exactly the same as the initial taste that slowly fades into oblivion. A lush and I dare say, classy wine. Not fun and fruity, but deep dark and thought provoking. Another case of a under $20 wine that can compete with the big boys.

2008 Cotes Du Rhone Signargues La Granacha – $13

I was wandering thru the wine shop looking for a bottle to purchase, nothing on sale interested me.  I saw a Granacha (why the Spanish spelling for a French wine, I don’t know) from the Cotes du Rhone, I checked the back label and saw that it was imported by Eric Solomon, that was a good sign. I have had good luck with Eric Solomon wines, he has a knack with finding good “off the beaten path”wines.

I hit the internet to find a bit of information and found this is sourced from 80 year old Grenache vines from the Signargues region of the Rhone Valley. Organic and sustainable farming, unfiltered and unfined (that means they do nothing to get solids out of the wine). Half the wine sees 6 months in French oak, the other half aged in stain-less steel vats. The Signargues is not a well known wine area, so the wines do not command a high price. The 2007 vintage got 91 point in Wine Spectator.

Opaque purple with a contrasting red halo. The nose is French funk, black  licorice, the smell of coloring Easter eggs and raspberry jam. The taste is bright fresh fruit mixed with jammy fruit, blackberries and blueberries with a late splash of spice in the back of your mouth, a bit of acidity can be felt on the tongue. The finish is chocolate milk, berries and a touch of spice. A well structured wine, not just a ton of fruit, layered and nuanced. This is a versatile wine that can be paired with many different dishes and still be a good back porch sipper.

CheapWineFinder’s Beginners Guide To Wine Part 2

How Do You Find The Right Wine For You?

The first group of wines most people come in contact with are what I call “supermarket wines”, these are wines that are mass-produced and made to a price point. They tend to taste the same year after year – nobody is running from one supermarket to another looking for the famed 2005 vintage of these wines, and the range in quality from “so-so” to “hey, this ain’t too bad”. They are not a bad starting point for your wine journey, the price is right and you can figure out if Cabernet Sauvignon,  Merlots or Chardonnay’s are your cup of tea. A sub-genre of the “supermarket wines” are the 2 Buck Chucks, Wal-Mart and 7-11 wines that sell for 2 or 3 bucks. How much does the bottle cost – or the cap – or the cardboard box it’s stored in? Or how much did it cost to be transported to your hometown and how much profit do they make per bottle?

As you can see, there is not much money in the equation for grapes and wine making. In times when grapes are cheap to buy, like now, these wines can be surprisingly drinkable, when grapes are more expensive, then you get what you pay for. In a side note , not all wines sold at the supermarket are “supermarket wines”, some stores also offer very interesting non mass produced wines.

Next we have the big box liquor stores. They have a wall full of coolers offering every beer you can think of and aisles and aisles of hard liquor, they also usually offer a large and varied selection of wines. These stores tend to have the best prices on wine, but are hit or miss on having staff available to help you find the right bottle of wine. A great many of the wines on the shelves are wines you would like, but mixed in among these wines are wines you would love, how do figure out which is which without buying every wine in the store? This is where “follow the winemaker” and “follow the importer” comes in handy, if you had a bottle of wine you enjoyed that was made by a certain winemaker, the chances are good that you will also enjoy another of the wines they make. Also with French and Spanish wines, if you look at the back label and see that it was imported by Eric Solomon or Kermit Lynch, there is a very good chance that it will be a top quality wine. If you do your homework the big box liquor stores can deliver some well-priced gems. But both the big liquor stores and the supermarkets have wine on their shelves that the Wine Buyers for these stores would never think of drinking, sometimes to get a quantity of a hot, in demand wine from the distributor they are required to take a certain amount of some not so hot wines. So be careful, not every wine on the shelf is worth trying.

And that brings us to the Wine Shop. Not so long ago if you went to one of these shops looking for a $10 bottle of wine you were treated as a nuisance, they made their money off the folks that came in to buy cases of expensive wine. But that has changed, they have figured out that today’s ten buck wine buyer is tomorrow’s steady customer if not the expensive case buyer. The wine that is available in almost all wine shops was personally tasted and selected by the owner of the shop, so if you sample one of their red wines and one of their white wines and really enjoy both, that might mean your palate and their palate have similar likes and dislikes. You now have a whole selection of wines that you had never heard of available to you, you’re gaining the shop owner’s 20 years of wine experience, all for the price of a bottle.

until the next episode……