Advice for those new to buying wine
Wine retains its mystique: it’s not like beer. Supposedly, you have to know something about wine to buy it effectively.
This post is for people who haven’t bought much wine for themselves, but have enjoyed wine often enough, at a restaurant or over at a friend’s house, to want to start buying for home use. Maybe you are in your 20s and new to alcohol. Maybe you’ve been drinking beer or liquor for years, and have just now developed a hankering to drink wine.
How do you start? For heaven’s sake, wine is supposed to be about leisure and fun—who wants to take a class? read this post instead.
How to begin
First, pay attention to any wine whose taste you enjoy. Maybe your companion ordered it at a restaurant, or you had some at a party. Type in a note on your phone. You’ll never remember the name well enough to pick it off the shelf weeks hence.
First rule
You like what you like. If you are starting young, you can’t afford the wines that professionals are raving about, anyway. Find a wine you liked, and that you can afford, and drink it again.
Second rule
Buy wine in the supermarket. Try to buy four to six bottles at a time (the threshold for a 10% discount in many stores). Supermarket buying volume, plus supermarket proneness to sales, plus supermarket 10% discounts, yield the lowest cost, especially if you are moving to a lifestyle where most of your dinners, or all your weekend and with-company dinners, are accompanied by wine.
Third rule
Decide on a price range that you can afford. When I was much younger, and just starting, I targeted $10 bottles, more or less. I had found that wines at $7, or $5, seldom pleased; plus I couldn’t afford to buy $15 bottles regularly. When I was exposed from time to time to $30 or $50 bottles, they didn’t necessarily taste better, or better enough, than my preferred $10 bottles. The taste was different, but not obviously worth the sizable price premium. It takes time for your palate to be educated.
Fourth rule
Buy every bottle in your price range that the store carries. Not all at once, but as you return to the store over time. You won’t like them all; don’t repurchase the ones that left you unsatisfied. Buy again any bottle that pleased you. If it pleases you a second time, it can become one of your staples. There’s no shame in drinking the same wine week after week. Although, I try not to drink the same wine more often than once a week. Variety is a piece of what yields pleasure.
Fifth rule
Splurge for holidays and special guests. Buy in the next price tier up, or as your career propsects rise, two tiers up; if these bottles taste really good, and your regular staple bottles don’t taste so good on the next occasion, then your palate may be growing more sophisticated. If your economic situation is improving apace, then it may be time to shift your everyday purchases up to the next price tier. Over the decades, I found I had to buy more and more expensive wine.
Sixth rule
Try different grapes. Most of us develop a preference for white or red, but there are many options within each. I drink mostly red, except standing up at a party (white wine spills are nothing, but red wine spills mean a change of clothes). I tried cabernet, merlot, syrah/shiraz, and others more obscure; I eventually settled on cabernet mixes and cabernet, but the point is, I experimented widely before I settled on the most satisfying grape.
Seventh rule
Price is a rough and imperfect guide to what you might like. Nonetheless, price tiers are real, guaranteed by market forces. A vintner can’t charge $20 unless enough people agree that the wine tastes better than the plethora of $10 bottles just below it on the shelf. But individual prices within a price tier are mostly noise: the $19 wines don’t reliably taste better than the $17 wines, which don’t reliably taste better than the $15 wines, which don’t reliably taste better than $12 wines, etc., even as many people would nonetheless prefer the $17 bottles over the $12 bottles, and the $19 bottles over the $15 bottles. Price tiers are real, but price variation within tiers is mostly noise.
The key word is reliably. On average, you can expect prices to be rational, despite variation. market systems, whatever their other problems, do provide this benefit. For example, if I give you ten $19 wines to taste blind, mixed with ten more $17 wines, and ask you to select the ten finalists–the better half of what you tasted–then I’d make money betting that the $19 wines would be over-represented among your “best 10 of 20,” as long as I got to repeat the bet with a large number of wine drinkers. Most participants in such a test would discover that six, seven, or eight of their top ten choices had been priced in the top group; and not too many people would have filled more than five spots with wines from the lower priced set. But again: only on average, over a population of drinkers.
The reason I buy widely within my price tier of the moment is precisely the hope of buying a $16 bottle that tastes better to me than most of what is priced at $20.
Eighth rule
Drink what you like, and not too much.