Welcome to the Recession!

Welcome to the recession! Everyone is talking about it. Most of us are feeling the pinch of it. Everyone is busy pointing fingers as to who caused it, who is going to solve it, who is making it worse, and who is capitalizing on it. And I, for one, am really tired of all of it. It kinda makes you want to drink, right? That’s why we’re here.

When it gets to the economic nonsensical hoodoo that is going on like right now, the bottom line for the rest of us is how to keep things in our lives as normal as possible while still saving a buck here or there. How that relates to wine is the ongoing argument of “value”.

This has long been a point of contention to me. Back, years ago, when a lot of wines from Chile were appearing on the market, the buzz on the grapevine was about how great of a value they were. However, upon the sampling of these dirt-cheap imports left me gasping, “Yeah, a great value since I didn’t want to pay a lot for my industrial-strength machinery degreaser.”

Alright. They weren’t all that bad, but in the sampling of these “values” had me considering just the basic idea that, in paying $2 more than the cost of these Chilean bottles of ‘meh’, you could net something far, far better. The real point being: what good is a “value” bottle of wine if you don’t really want to drink it? At all?

Of course, value is something different to all of us, and that’s a longer debate I will gladly pursue at another time. Before you pass judgement on my theory here, think of the cheapest wine out there. An amalgam of these wines might be something like Thunder-Mad-Train 50/50, or something like that. It’s some pretty nasty stuff. It may or may not have had actual grapes in its origins. But it does have alcohol. It does have “flavor”. And it’s only 75 Cents for a full bottle! Say it with me, now: “What a ‘value’!” Does that paint the picture pretty well?

I thought the time was ripe to have a little examination of these “budget” wines. I had shied away from the “values” for years since, to be frank, if you can pay a wholesale price, it kinda ups the ante when it comes to “value”. So my goal for the next couple weeks is to try a bunch of these cheaper wines, and report back on what’s decent, and what’s degreaser. Stay tuned. More to come.