Good Cheap Wines vs Expensive Premium Wines

The old adage “You get what you pay for” applies to most things we buy. However, when it comes to wine, this saying often goes by the wayside. There are plenty of wines that sell from $20 into the stratosphere that are really not that good. How many times have you been disappointed with an expensive bottle of wine? There are plenty of good wines to be had that are less than $20 that are equal to or better than wines in the ultra premium category. In the Wine Spectator’s list of 100 top wines for 2006, I counted 17 wines that were priced at $20 or less. Recently we opened two bottles of Pinot Noir and just for fun asked our guests to tell us which one they liked the best. We offered them two glasses so they could do a side-by-side comparison. One glass had a $40 Pinot; the other had a $13 Pinot. Guess which one was the favorite wine? Right, the $13 wine was more complex, tasty, and blah, blah, blah. I decided to try Ning to see if we could get a bunch of average wine drinkers out there to help find the best inexpensive wines available. Let’s see how it goes.