Easy-drinking wines for less than a tenner

Iam constantly surprised by the number of people who tell me that they rarely spend less than €20 on a bottle of wine. Clearly, I lead a sheltered life, given that a recent report from Britain says that most consumers there never spend more than a fiver.

There’s a myth that, while wine comes with various prices tags, it’s all much the same. That a cheap cabernet from the Pays d’Oc can, just possibly, taste as good, or indeed, better, than Château Margaux.

It’s not true, of course, and you get what you pay for – most of the time. I was served a “natural”, skin-contact white wine recently that didn’t taste of homemade cider (as I think so many of them do). I didn’t taste it as I couldn’t get past the nose, which was pure hyrdogen sulphide, aka rotten eggs. Retail price? Somewhere in the 30s.

Anyway, contrary to what the wine snobs may claim, it’s quite easy these days to get a bottle of wine for a tenner, or thereabouts, that is more than drinkable. Some are really very good but, naturally, you’re never going to get vast complexity at that price. Complexity takes both time and money. But you can get wines that pair brilliantly with foods and deliver genuine pleasure.

But you will have to go to the supermarkets because small independents can’t shine at this level. What they do is arguably much more important, seeking out and offering us wines that would often never stand a chance on the supermarket shelves.

The wines I feature this week, in deference to the penury from which most of us start to suffer round about this time of year, offer terrific value for money. Even if you like to spend a lot more on wine as a rule, here are wines that will very nicely grace a Tuesday supper, for example.

You need to drink simpler, cheaper wines, well made and fresh, designed for early and often easy drinking, in order to appreciate properly the serious gear.

Here endeth the lesson...

‘Complexity takes both time and money’