Good, cheap wine

Not all expensive wine is good. Not all cheap wine is bad. Here’s an attempt to chronicle the best of the latter.

“Wine for Tightwads,” an article by Mike Steinberger in Slate, goes through some of them including Taurino Salice Salentino, “the world’s greatest pizza wine.” I agree with his assertion that Two-Buck Chuck is terrible.

You can get good cheap wines from many local, small wineries, but there’s plenty of decent import deals too. There’s two recent books you’ll want to reference: Robert Druitt’s Report on the Cheap Wines from France, Italy, Austria, Greece and Hungary and
Robin Goldstein’s The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings. The latter is a must-have for everyday wine drinkers. And both of these books cost less than the bottles of wine in question!

There’s a number of review sites that are dedicated to the good, cheap wine. Their names are obvious, if unimaginative: cheap wine reviews, good cheap wine guide and good wine cheap.

Pizza wines

See note above. Some chiantis, merlots, and Italian reds make great “pizza wines.”

2006 Marchesi di Barolo Barbera Monferrato Maraia has been named Official Pizza Wine of 2008 by hartford.com.

Trend article: “Pizza, wine combine quite nicely” (Dec 2008)

“A Pizza Wine Fiasco?,” an article from Ireland’s Connections Magazine (Aug 2007), is an attempt to analyze what makes the perfect pizza wine.

“Pizza Wine,” a blog entry from the “good wine under $20“ blog.

Online wine sources

I recently heard about mywinesdirect.com which has a coupon code of “radio” and supposedly offers bulk discounts. There’s also getmywines.com.

Excellent winehunting searchpatterns: one two

For further reference