This is probably heretical or wine sacrilege, but I'd like to tackle the myth surrounding the $5 bottle of wine - the one that says you cannot get a decent bottle of wine for $5. Wine drinkers tend to spend a great deal more than $5 for a bottle of wine and if you like a bottle or half a bottle with your dinner, it adds up. It can add up to the extent that it slows down your progress towards your dream lifestyle.
Now I am NOT going to advocate that you should give up your wine, heaven forbid! Steve and I are big wine drinkers and have no interest in giving up steak and red wine, pizza and red wine, chicken in cream sauce with white wine - you get the picture.
I do want to share a discovery we made when provisioning our boat for this trip. Since we were stocking up for being away from supermarkets (and wine stores) for months at a time, I had to lay in a full stock of wine for the period, half a bottle of wine a day for 3 months or 45 bottles. When you're looking at 45 bottles of wine at $8, $12, $15 a bottle, the cost adds up. Given what we had just spent readying the boat and on the rest of the provisions, my spending threshold was nearing and I didn't want to spend a fortune on wine.
So I went to a wine superstore in Tampa and bought every interesting looking bottle of wine in the $5 range, 45 bottles at $5 each, and crossed my fingers hoping that they would be drinkable. It was a high risk strategy for someone who is a California, Italy, and Chilean wine snob and who has decided preferences about boldness, sweetness and thinness of wines. We drink a lot of wine and have a pretty clear understanding of what's good and what's not.
This strategy was somewhat influenced by a dinner we had in Orlando last year where the head of one of the software companies took us out to dinner. This guy really enjoyed his wine and ordered close to $1000 worth over the course of the meal. Now we had never had a $200 bottle of wine before and the wine was lovely.
In talking it over after we got home though, we assessed whether (to us) there was $190 difference in taste between the $200 bottle and the $10 bottle we were typically getting at the time. Did it taste $190 better? It was better, but not $190 better. So (for us) the increase in price for the bottle of wine did not deliver the comparable increase in taste.
If you compared a $200 bottle of wine side by side with a $5 or $10 bottle of wine, the chances are very good that the $200 bottle of wine would taste better - but who does that?! We typically have wine with a nice meal, we don't have a wine tasting. If the wine goes well with the food, it's usually very nice.
(Btw, if you get a bottle of wine which is a little sharp, a little sour for your taste - serve it with pickles or something with vinegar in it. Sweetens it right up and a so-so wine turns into something really nice!)
My sister told me of a recent 'Blind Wine Tasting Party' where everyone brought a bottle of wine under $10 and over $20. One of the cheapest wines came in second place. We're going to have our own to test this and see what the results are.
Anyway, back to the $5 wine adventure. 45 bottles of wine at $5 each. Guess how many bad ones we've had? Not a one. (To be fair, there was one that was a bit thin, but that is a taste preference of ours rather than something wrong with the wine.)
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