VALUE FOR MONEY

Wine tasting can be a minefield, but wine shopping shouldn’t have to be,

My friend thinks my credenza needs its own website. It’s always topped with an ever-changing selection of wine samples sent from wineries and their agents — that’s where they end up when I come in the door. Some bottles make it into this column, but most get poured down the sink.

Truth is, the majority of wines under $20 taste somewhere between vapid and vile. All too often, they burn the back of the throat from high relative alcohol, grip the gums with an unpleasant astringency, or taste just plain dirty from careless fruit selection. Or they’re deadly dull. Boring, single note and ordinary. So I sip, spit, and repeat until I find something fabulous.

Something that offers honest value for the money.

Something that not only ticks the critical boxes of being clean, wellmade and stylistically correct, but leaps over the threshold of mediocrity to offer more complexity, concentration and length than most bottles at its given price point.

As well as tasting the steady stream of samples that arrive at my home, I spend much of my time popping bottles with winemakers and industry types and attending trade tastings. All in search of your next great bottle.

In short, I taste so you can keep on uncorking — or screwing off — without having to contend with vinous disappointment. Wine tasting can be a minefield. But wine shopping shouldn’t have to be.

Which brings me to the point of this column. To keep your drinking in fine form, I’m recommending five bottles this week under $17, and each one could sell for more. For the record, I actually tasted 56 sub-$17 samples to find them.

Buying all five should stock your wine rack nicely. I’ve found a steelyslick Soave Classico from Italy (serve it ice cold for an instant thrill), a sauvignon blanc from Marlborough (tough to beat at this price), a Chenin Blanc from South Africa (if more people knew the charms of this grape variety, prices would skyrocket), a cabernet sauvignon from South Africa (quite certain this one will have you hankering for grilled steak), and a tempranillo from Rioja (love the way this wine, like Spain, takes you in like a masked lover). Cheers. Carolyn Evans Hammond is a Torontobased wine writer. She is also a Londontrained sommelier and two-time bestselling wine book author. Reach her at carolyn@carolynevanshammond.com.