There is reason that everyone who likes wine to be interested in cheap wine, regardless of their budget, income or wealth. The thing to consider beside matching wine to food is someone's daily eating habits. Consider people who live in countries that have been producing wine for centuries. They regard wine as food. Just as any other people, the food they have at home ranges in quality. I mean sometimes they have thought out, excellent meals, but sometimes they have leftovers or things that are more convenient due to tiredness or shortage of time, etc. Europeans do not open bottles of excellent wine to have with these lesser meals, but they do not want to go without wine. They have wine that is similar in quality to the food. A lesser wine may be nice to drink, but not to savor. In some of these cultures, it is considered even okay to add a little water to the wine. They have normal, daily wine for their normal, daily meals. What you might just call table wine, although this term seems to have some legal meanings in the U.S., so I will not use it, but hopefully you get the idea.
I have not looked into this lately, but in Spain in the recent past, where wine is made practically everywhere, a family would send someone to their local bodega with a jug to buy some local, young wine for their regular meals. I expect that similar habits still exist in many parts of Europe (even though extreme regulation is pervasive). We in the United States are not able to do the same, more often than not because few of us live near wine growing regions, or because regulations do not permit what is common in Europe. What we can do then is to find bottles of decent, young wine that are cheap enough that if some is thrown away from spoilage it is no big deal. On the other hand, we are not constrained by having just the local crop, so that if we prefer Italian style or we want sauvignon blanc, we can select what we want. Also, because it is cheap, we can have a wide assortment in our own wine rack to select when we want it. Cheap, good wine is something all of us can have everyday, anyday.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
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