Amidst all the romance and storytelling in the wine world, it’s easy to lose sight of one of the most important aspects of wine: value for money. I’m certainly guilty of overemphasizing the latest tiny producer making wines in minute quantities that are difficult to obtain. While such wines are fascinating and exciting and often have great stories behind them, they don’t relate much to the everyday drinking goals of many people who enjoy wine.
Sometimes you don’t need a wine with an incredible story behind it. Sometimes you just want a $20 wine that tastes like a $50 one.
While the sommeliers on Instagram gush over “unicorn wines” — wines that are so rarified or obscure that you’re lucky if you ever get to open a single bottle in your career — sometimes it can feel like great wine values are equally as scarce, especially from California, the source of 80% of the domestic wine consumed in America.
I’ll be honest. For under $20 there’s not a lot of great wine being made in California these days, and that’s doubly true if you’re talking about red wines made from the most popular grape varieties, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, or Merlot. I most acutely run into this problem when friends ask me to select some California wines for a local wedding. Their budgets rarely allow for wines priced over $25 and and while they would love a great Napa Cabernet or Sonoma County Pinot Noir, that price point mostly relegates them to California wines that you’d find on the supermarket wine shelf.
All of which is why, if you want the best value for your money when it comes to wine, you’d best look outside the United States, where even though you’re paying for the import taxes and the cost of shipping the wine overseas, land and labor costs (not to mention exchange rates) are all working in favor of the budget-contained wine lover.
To wit: out of the recently published 100 Best Values under $15 by Wine and Spirits Magazine, a mere 7 of them were from California, and only 25 were from the United States (quite a good showing from New York Finger Lakes by the way).
There are number of places to look for great value in the wider world of wine, and amongst the very best of them you will find Chile.
Chile has always been associated with value when it comes to wine. For the last 20 years they’ve been selling massive quantities of $8 to $10 Sauvignon Blanc to thirsty wine lovers all over the world. In the process, the country has become a victim of its own success, and now that’s pretty much the only thing most people think about when they think about Chilean wine.
But value in Chile doesn’t just exist at the level of $10 wine. It extends quite a ways up the price scale. And this represents great news for American wine lovers, especially those who are looking for a great bottle of wine, but would prefer something a bit more mainstream instead of, say an $18 bottle of something they’ve never heard of, like Savatiano.
The punchline: if you want to spend $25 and get a killer bottle of Cabernet or Pinot Noir, Chile has you covered.
In fact, that’s where I just spent a week wandering around the country courtesy of a press junket organized by Wines of Chile. I didn’t go to focus on Cabernet and Pinot Noir — I think Chile has more exciting things to offer right now — but I couldn’t help tasting a bunch while I was there and I kept having the same experience over and over again.
I’d taste a glass of wine, think to myself, that it was pretty darn good. And then I’d ask what the retail price was in the United States, and constantly find myself with my jaw hanging open when someone told me a price point that was at least 30% lower than I was expecting.
As a wine industry, Chile feels stuck in a rut. The country’s reputation for great, cheap wine has become its Achilles Heel, and now the country is having a hard time getting people’s attention anywhere outside the lower shelves of the supermarket wine aisle.
But the sheer quality to price ratio of many Chilean wines is staggering, and anyone willing to pay $20 to $25 for a good bottle of wine will find themselves richly rewarded if they go searching for great wine from Chile.
