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This article was published in The 30 Second Wine Advisor on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2008 and can be found at http://www.wineloverspage.com/wineadvisor2/tswa20080102.php. Wine Focus - Great value wines
Life, as a wine-loving sage once wrote, is too short to drink poor wine; but for most of us, drinking expensive wine is at best an infrequent option. Hence the ongoing pursuit of wines of good value. But what exactly constitutes "good value"? For me, a low price is not enough. In order to pass my value test, a wine must not only be affordable in price but exceptional in quality as well. Although a wine flawed in wine making or fruit is an instant deal-breaker, the mere absence of flaws is not sufficient to catch my attention. While I might sacrifice exceptional complexity or awe-inspiring intensity in an affordable wine, I think it's fair to expect even a modest wine to show such fundamental criteria as balance, food-friendly acidity, varietal character or regional typicity, and at least a degree of complexity and flavor interest. In short, low price does not excuse a wine that's poorly made, or wine that's boring. This are not just academic matters, especially at the chilly dawn of a new year, when many of us have put both our bodies and our wallets on a diet after a season of holiday excess. To turn the quest for wine value into a community effort, we've declared "Great Value Wines" the topic for January's Wine Focus in our online WineLovers Discussion Group. We'll be spending the month talking about what constitutes value in wine, how to find it, and most important, sharing tips and tasting reports on affordable wines of exceptional value. For the purposes of this discussion, we're facing reality and setting the cutoff for "affordable" at a rather spendy $15 (or, for those outside the U.S., your local equivalent in Euros, pounds sterling, loonies, Australian or Kiwi dollars or what have you. As noted in Monday's Wine Advisor, My best wine values of 2007, and my just posted The Year's Best Wine Values the realities of the marketplace have pushed the threshold for most good wine well past the $10 mark. Still, the hunt for really good, really inexpensive wine continues, and any tips and tasting notes on single-digit wines of real value will win special applause, To get things started, I've posted my notes on two recently tasted Côtes-du-Rhône reds that I found for less than $10, a rare achievement for any European wine of quality in the era of the strong Euro and the weak dollar. You'll find my tasting notes below. Tell us about your favorites! To participate in this month's online tastings, click to Wine Focus in the WineLovers Discussion Group,
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