Choosing an everyday red wine
 

For someone who knows diddly squat about wine and can't tell one wine from another, what is a reasonably priced (ie. less than 15.00) decent quality red wine available in BC liquor stores?

I have a whole list! Pm me your e-mail addy!!! There are some amazing wines under $15!!
And yes they are found in the bc stores, as I used to live there!

reds
 

Chile has some great reds under 15$.Iam a Cab Sav guy but maybe start with Merlot as a bit smoother

One of the best selling wines in our store is Marus James merlot, an Argentian wine. I prefer Cab Sauv myself but this is a very nice wine.

Chile has some amazing cheep wines but they are still a rather young wine producing nation and I find there wines are rather incosistant, one year I had a merlot that was exalant, but the next year the same lable was so badI wouldn't feed it to a dog.

befor we can realy recomend a red for every day drinking we would have to know what kind of taste you have. do you want a heavy red to drink with a meal, a medium that could be drunk with a meal or by its self, or a red for sipping on its own with a few friends?

also do you like a heavy, medium or light red, and finaly do you like dry very dry sweet, ect?

I have a few reds I like, there is the ones for eating with a meal, cab sav, and red zinfandel (not the rose version) but they are all full bodied dry reds. my personaly choice of these three is the zinfandel. the cab sav is the classic mainstay with heavy oak and fruit undertones.

for medium boddies ones Shiraz and Merlot (although I finds some merlots to be full bodied) are good medium bodied wine. if you like a pepery flavor the merlot might be your choice, but the shiraz is a very nice wine also.

for light wines Pinot Noir, Petit Syrah are nice drinking ones.

as for recomending a perticular bottle that is hard as everyones tasts are different, and I make 90% of my own wine now so my recomendations would be about 3 years out of date, but what I would recomend is depending on how often you drink wine, go out buy a few boittles say 3 different ones. buy some fruit and cheese and have a mini wine tasting with some friends.. I used to run wine tastings when I worked in the wine store, and I have done them with a few friends.. we had three cupples and each couple brought a bottle. have some simple guid lines like every one bring the same type of wine but from different countries or regions. or maybe different types of wines from the same region.

I would recomend starting by trying different wines from the same region, so have a BC night and have say a cab sav, a merlot and a zinfandel. pic your faviorite, then next time try the one you liked the best but from different areas, zinfandel will be hard as it is mainly from california, but you could try different wineries ect. then try medium ones and light ones.. you can have a lot of fun and try a tone of different wines this way for relitively little money.

I recomended starting off with the Cab sav, merlot and zinfandel as they are normaly 3 very good wines and all can be found in versions under 15 bucks.

one warning though, once you get hooked you could end up spending money on another hobby and start making your own wine. this is a more simple hobby compared to reefing and if you can ballance water chemistry in a tank you can easily make wine :mrgreen: I make some reds that end up costing me about 3 to 4 bucks a bottle that I would put up against $50.00+ bottles in a heartbeat and at one time I had over 400 buttles of 14 different types of wine. I used to make wine with friends also.. so each of us would make a batch then we would get 10 bottles from each batch.. so 3 friends = 3 batches = 90 bottles of 3 different wines so that is a good way to build up a variaty of wines.

Steve

I like Dr. Zenzen Vino Noir

Okanagan wines have come a long way in the last decade or so. I like to 'buy local' whenever I can for that reason. Support your BC wine industry and I'm sure you'll find a reasonably priced variety that suits your taste. Yes, I'm a little biased since I live in the North Okanagan, but I've tried many varieties of wine from all parts of the globe and the quality here is second to none these days. In the end, it comes down to your own taste buds.

Try a Latitude 50 red from Gray Monk, I think that fits into the price range you're looking at. It's a blend of several grape varieties, taking advantage of the desireable qualities from each as determined by the head wine maker. If you like a lighter red, try the Gray Monk Rotenberger. Pretty sure both are available in most BC liquor stores.

Farther south in the Okanagan valley, there's the Golden mile near Oliver. More wineries there than you can shake a stick at. The competition is pretty intense these days, so if you don't produce a quality wine, you won't last long down there. Also a number of them in the Kelowna area. As suggested by StirCrazy, try a few from a particular region to see if something suits your taste. I quite regularly buy the Peller Estates Proprietor's Reserve Cabernet-Merlot in the 4 litre box (= 5 & 1/3 bottles) from the local liquor store. It's about $35, so less than $10 per litre for a nice everday red wine.

I always liked Masi Valipolcella from Italy. Quit drinking now for three years though, so maybe it's not as good now....?

Ask for "Fuzion". The Red is a Cabernet-Shriaz and is amazingly good for ~$8 a bottle. This stuff set records with the Ontario liquor board in the last year and there were fistfights in liquor stores when they ran out. It took over a year to get supply volumes to meed demand !

They now have a white as well -I have a bottle but haven't tried it yet. Can't go wrong for the price.

I like one glass of wine in the evening an hour or two before bedtime. I have no clue about heavy, light, medium, dry, sweet etc. I do know I don't like wines that seem artificially flavoured to be fruity, spicy etc. And I've tried various types of wines (Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, a few others) and if you didn't show me the label I wouldn't be able to tell them apart.

coppermoon makes a lovely wine! Peace porter for a white, painted turtle, it's kind of a trial and error! just buy a few cheap bottles and find one you really like. as I said, I have a list! chile has a great selection as stated above!

I could use that list bean...
Everytime I need to buy some wine for guests I have no clue whats worth buying, so usually end up with 3 bottles of meh..

I find red wine different that white, and also I found it quite common for people when new to red wine now knowing what they like. I found for myself at first all reds tasted the same and were ok, then as a drank more i started noticing the differances. red wine is generaly an aquired taste.

Ok so heavy medium light..

a heavy boddied wine is one with a in your face heavy flavor and after taste. the old convention is you would drink these with red meat and pasta as there flavore wouldn't be over powered by the food. If compaired to dairy products these would be like cream in your mouth

medium reds would be a little less intensity in flavor and taste, convention was that these were more suited for lighter foods and as a dairy it would be like whole milk in your mouth.

Light reds are kinda wattery in the flavor and taste and are great for drinking by them selves but would easily get overpowered by a lot of foods. compaired to dairy they would be like skim milk.


now conventions are out the window now also, the red for steak, white for fish no longer applies unless you are cought in a time warp somewhere, it is now what ever you liek with what ever. Some night I like a glass of cab sav because I want the bold oaked flavor.

now after saying all that I find it amazing that you didn't notice the difference between a Shiraz and a Cabernet Sauvignon, did you have them at the same time? I can understand it you had one then a few days or weeks later you had another. thats why I recomended wine tastings as a way to figure out what you realy like as the more you drink red wine the more you will notice the subtle differances.

we used to run 1 formal tasting a month in the shop which would consiste of 6 wines and be set up for about 30 people, but we used to have mini tastings several times a week to compare different wines when we got new ones or when customers needed some extra help picking a wine.

Steve

I agree with Bean, Coppermoon makes some nice wines for the dollar. My wife and I are fans of Chile & Australian wines, but there is also some other countries that do also make great wine. Once you find something you like pay attention to what region of the country it comes from as that makes a big difference. Can be from the same country but different regions make a big difference.