Join us in our (somewhat obsessive) search for delicious wines that we can actually afford to drink every day!

The basics –

• We’re looking for wines that cost between $7 and $12 that could be rated at around 85-92 points (very good to great).
• Each month we evaluate 10-12 wines in this price range, looking for the diamonds in the rough.
• The wines for each month are organized around a topic like a specific varietal or region (EG: Syrah, Spain, Cabernet, Washington State, etc)
• We purchase the bottles retail from Total Wine, Trader Joe’s, or Costco.
• The wines are researched before buying in an attempt to weed out the truly awful stuff and focus on those that have some potential. (We use Cellar Tracker, Vivino, Wine Searcher, and others for this research.)
• Tasting notes for each wine are posted throughout the month and then rankings and recommendations are posted at the end.

The background –

I got bit by the wine bug around three years ago and got sucked in fast. My wife and I started out drinking just a couple bottles a month, never spending more than $15 on a bottle (or box quite often), and usually only keeping a handful of bottles around the house. But once that “wine lover” switch flipped, things changed  and changed fast. Before I knew it, we had 300 bottles in the basement, new shipments showing up every week, and we were regularly cycling through 20 year old classified Bordeaux and CA cult cabs.  Lots of fun but too much money! It was time to cut back…

But here’s the problem… After a few years of drinking a lot of good wine, you can’t go back to just drinking whatever TotalWine or Costco has on sale for $5. You realize that $5 just isn’t going to cut it. And even at $10 it can be really tough to find truly enjoyable wine. But not impossible! There are a ton of great wines out there for around $10. It just takes a lot more work to find them.

Now some would see this search as a chore. But I totally disagree! With wine, the search is half the fun! Discovery, learning, and expanding your horizons are all part of the wine culture. And I can do that just as well at $10 as I can at $100. Heck at the lower prices, you can afford to experiment and explore even more! So I figured I’d turn this into more of a fun game, rather than a cost cutting chore. The rules of the game are outlined above and you can follow my efforts right here.

Of course, it’s no fun to be a one trick pony, so beyond just the value challenge, I’ll post other random stuff from time to time. Hopefully you find it all useful and entertaining!