Great wines under $8.00

In Australia you can get quality cleanskins for $5.00 or less.

Under $8, and the preferred tipples of gentlemen of the road, I should imagine

The Red Vineyard (November 1888), Pushkin Museum, Moscow). Sold to Anna Boch, 1890.

Doc Watson wrote:In Australia you can get quality cleanskins for $5.00 or less.

But you must keep in mind that with wine what you pay for is often what you get .
There are some very cheap labels in Australia , Gossips , Chateau Warburn etc that are not really worth buying .

there's a rumour going around town that Aldi will soon be selling alcohol......

decisions, decisions - should I go to Adli and buy decent, good value wine

or continue patronising my local bottle shop where the wine flows cheap and free? (sometimes they let me pay later)

unless Aldi has some excellent low-priced wines, then I shall continue to bring my patronage to teh local liquor.....(Indian owned)

and friendly

pinhedz wrote:

Doc Watson wrote:

Doc Watson wrote:In Australia you can get quality cleanskins for $5.00 or less.

But you must keep in mind that with wine what you pay for is often what you get .
There are some very cheap labels in Australia , Gossips , Chateau Warburn etc that are not really worth buying .

That's why this thread is not entitled "Wines under $800."
It's "Great Wines under $800."

And some would argue that with wine you often do not get what you pay for--especially if you pay a lot.

It looks like $8.00 to me not $800

ISN wrote:there's a rumour going around town that Aldi will soon be selling alcohol......

decisions, decisions - should I go to Adli and buy decent, good value wine

or continue patronising my local bottle shop where the wine flows cheap and free? (sometimes they let me pay later)

unless Aldi has some excellent low-priced wines, then I shall continue to bring my patronage to teh local liquor.....(Indian owned)

and friendly

Aldi have been selling alcohol for a long time now. From what I have investigated most if not all there wine is specially botled for them . Some of thir beer is imported from Germany .
At this stage I would prefer to buy my discount wine from well known discount stores and buy well known brands.
But I may well buy some beer at Aldi to try out.

pinhedz wrote:I had a Penfolds Shiraz yesterday--I was surprised at how good it was.

Penfolds make many types of Shiraz ranging from the cheap under eight dollars a bottle to some like St Henri which are closer to one hundred dollars.

Dan Murphy's still selling cleanskins at $1.95 good quaffing wine !

Assuming I can wager on a negative evolution in the euro/dollar-ratio, this wine will qualify:



A souple, fairly elegant house wine, a bouquet of red berries and a short but strong after-tone of tanines.
At € 5,99 it's a more than reasonable deal!

Andy wrote:Assuming I can wager on a negative evolution in the euro/dollar-ratio, this wine will qualify:



A souple, fairly elegant house wine, a bouquet of red berries and a short but strong after-tone of tanines.
At € 5,99 it's a more than reasonable deal!

But I think six pounds is more than eight dollars!

Doc Watson wrote:

Andy wrote:Assuming I can wager on a negative evolution in the euro/dollar-ratio, this wine will qualify:



A souple, fairly elegant house wine, a bouquet of red berries and a short but strong after-tone of tanines.
At € 5,99 it's a more than reasonable deal!

But I think six pounds is more than eight dollars!

That's 6 euros.

felix wrote:

Doc Watson wrote:

Andy wrote:Assuming I can wager on a negative evolution in the euro/dollar-ratio, this wine will qualify:



A souple, fairly elegant house wine, a bouquet of red berries and a short but strong after-tone of tanines.
At € 5,99 it's a more than reasonable deal!

But I think six pounds is more than eight dollars!

That's 6 euros.

nearly $10.00 Australian dollars

pinhedz wrote:$8.03

Three cents... that's almost five pesetas. I can lend you a cinco pesetas coin por la gracia de Dios...



Speaking of God (Dios) and coins... when I was a child I was a strong believer and my brother took advantage of that: "I swear to God Vera Cruz is going to give me 100 pesetas" he said... and I didn't want him to sin...

There has been a wine glut or oversupply of wine in Australia for years now and good quality quffing unlabelled wines or cleanskins are cheap.

Doc Watson wrote:There has been a wine glut or oversupply of wine in Australia for years now and good quality quffing unlabelled wines or cleanskins are cheap.

Monty Python's Flying Circus -
"Australian Table Wines"

[ from the album Monty Python's Previous Record, 1972 ]

The Players: Eric Idle - Wine Expert; The Scene:Soft introduction music plays .....

WINE EXPERT: A lot of people in this country pooh-pooh Australian table wines. This is a pity as many fine Australian wines appeal not only to the Australian palate but also to the cognoscenti of Great Britain.

Black Stump Bordeaux is rightly praised as a peppermint flavoured Burgundy, whilst a good Sydney Syrup can rank with any of the world's best sugary wines.

Château Blue, too, has won many prizes; not least for its taste, and its lingering afterburn.

Old Smokey 1968 has been compared favourably to a Welsh claret, whilst the Australian Wino Society thoroughly recommends a 1970 Coq du Rod Laver, which, believe me, has a kick on it like a mule: eight bottles of this and you're really finished. At the opening of the Sydney Bridge Club, they were fishing them out of the main sewers every half an hour.

Of the sparkling wines, the most famous is Perth Pink. This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is 'beware'. This is not a wine for drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.

Another good fighting wine is Melbourne Old-and-Yellow, which is particularly heavy and should be used only for hand-to-hand combat.

Quite the reverse is true of Château Chunder, which is an appellation contrôlée, specially grown for those keen on regurgitation; a fine wine which really opens up the sluices at both ends.

Real emetic fans will also go for a Hobart Muddy, and a prize winning Cuivre Reserve Château Bottled Nuit San Wogga Wogga, which has a bouquet like an aborigine's armpit.

Doc Watson wrote:
But I think six pounds is more than eight dollars!

Andy wrote:Assuming I can wager on a negative evolution in the euro/dollar-ratio, this wine will qualify

By March it will probably fit the 'Wines under $5,00'-thread.
By August the 'Remember what things used to cost when there was still a euro'-thread.
By Novermber 2013 the 'Things we used to have before the war'-thread, possibly.

eddie wrote:

Doc Watson wrote:There has been a wine glut or oversupply of wine in Australia for years now and good quality quffing unlabelled wines or cleanskins are cheap.

Monty Python's Flying Circus -
"Australian Table Wines"

[ from the album Monty Python's Previous Record, 1972 ]

The Players: Eric Idle - Wine Expert; The Scene:Soft introduction music plays .....

WINE EXPERT: A lot of people in this country pooh-pooh Australian table wines. This is a pity as many fine Australian wines appeal not only to the Australian palate but also to the cognoscenti of Great Britain.

Black Stump Bordeaux is rightly praised as a peppermint flavoured Burgundy, whilst a good Sydney Syrup can rank with any of the world's best sugary wines.

Château Blue, too, has won many prizes; not least for its taste, and its lingering afterburn.

Old Smokey 1968 has been compared favourably to a Welsh claret, whilst the Australian Wino Society thoroughly recommends a 1970 Coq du Rod Laver, which, believe me, has a kick on it like a mule: eight bottles of this and you're really finished. At the opening of the Sydney Bridge Club, they were fishing them out of the main sewers every half an hour.

Of the sparkling wines, the most famous is Perth Pink. This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is 'beware'. This is not a wine for drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.

Another good fighting wine is Melbourne Old-and-Yellow, which is particularly heavy and should be used only for hand-to-hand combat.

Quite the reverse is true of Château Chunder, which is an appellation contrôlée, specially grown for those keen on regurgitation; a fine wine which really opens up the sluices at both ends.

Real emetic fans will also go for a Hobart Muddy, and a prize winning Cuivre Reserve Château Bottled Nuit San Wogga Wogga, which has a bouquet like an aborigine's armpit.

A lot has changed in 39 years

How to make perfect mulled wine

Is mulled wine a guaranteed spirit raiser, or by far the worst thing about Christmas? What do you put in yours?


Mulled wine. Photograph: Tracy Hebden/Alamy

On the first day of Christmas – well, December – I found myself waiting at an unusually fragrant bar. "Ooh, mulled wine!" said my friend, "brilliant!" And lo, despite having arrived with the intention of sinking a cold, dry gin and tonic, I ended up clutching a plastic cup of warm sweet wine. Such is the time of year.

Despite its high sugar content, mulled wine is not a drink that's aged well. The thin, oddly sour broth on tap at most pubs during the festive season is a sad comedown for a tipple originally designed to show off the wealth and generosity of a medieval household. Mulling is not just an excuse to serve laughably cheap wine to your unfortunate guests, although it does have that as a fringe benefit – there's a real art to it.


Medieval tipple

Given the drink's origins, I decide to start with a recipe from The Forme of Cury, a cookery book published about 1390, which starts, promisingly: "Pur fait Ypocras …" I must grind together cinnamon, ginger, galangal, cloves, long pepper, nutmeg, marjoram, cardamom and grains of paradise – although sadly I'm unable to lay my hands on any "spykenard de Spayn". A historical site helpfully suggests substituting rosemary for this aromatic Indian root, so I stick a bit of that into the pestle and mortar as well. Further than this, the recipe is coy, so I tip in some cheap French red, on the vague basis that wine was probably pretty rubbish in those days, and a suitably parsimonious amount of sugar, and taste. The mishmash of spice is overpowering – it tastes like something that might have been used to ward off the plague, rather than to make merry with during the cold, candle-lit evenings of the 14th century.

Mrs Beeton

Jumping forward five centuries, I turn to Mrs Beeton, Delia's Victorian great-grandmother, for advice. She's also pretty vague ("in making preparations like the above, it is very difficult to give the exact proportions of ingredients like sugar and spice, as what quantity might suit one person would be to another quite distasteful" she explains, helpfully), but at least the list of ingredients is more manageable: cloves, grated nutmeg, cinnamon, wine and sugar.

Thing have moved forward in 500 years; rather than just sticking everything into ye pan and hoping for the best, this recipe starts with a mulled tea. I simmer the spices together in 235ml water, "until the flavour is extracted", and then add a pint of wine, and some sugar to taste, and bring it all to the boil. The result? Classic mulled wine – not particularly exciting, but palatable enough, despite the inclusion of water, which has no place in a wine-based punch.

Delia

Delia's own recipe is an old favourite of mine: heat a couple of bottles of wine with 6 tbsp honey, an orange studded with cloves, a few slices of orange and lemon, some ground ginger and a cinnamon stick, and allow to simmer gently for 20 minutes before serving. The citrus works brilliantly with the warm spices to create a kind of winter sangria effect which never fails to please, particularly if one takes her up on the optional 2 tbsp of Grand Marnier, and then adds a few more for good measure.

Jamie

Time marches on, however, and since I first pledged allegiance to Delia and her Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon, there have been developments in the world of mulled wine – as seen in Jamie Oliver's "Christmas in a glass". Unlike Delia, with her pleasingly simple one-step method, Jamie's recipe kicks off with a syrup base, made by putting the sugar in a large pan along with some clementine juice and peel, lemon and lime peel, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, bay leaves, nutmeg and vanilla, and then pouring in enough red wine to just cover it all. This is then gently heated until the sugar has dissolved, at which point the cook merrily cranks the heat up and keeps the mixture at a rolling boil until it becomes a thick syrup.

"The reason I'm doing this first," Jamie explains, "is to create a wonderful flavour base by really getting the sugar and spices to infuse and blend well with the wine. It's important to do make a syrup base first," he continues, "because it needs to be quite hot, and if you do this with both bottles of wine in there you'll burn off the alcohol." And no one wants that, do they?

Once the syrup is ready, you can pour in the rest of the wine and a couple of star anise, heat through, and serve. Although I think he's been a bit heavy-handed with the sugar and citrus peel, the flavours seem better blended, and mellower than I'm used to – and, it strikes me, it would be easy enough to make a batch of syrup in advance, and then dispense as required throughout the mulled wine season, in the manner of a well-prepared paragon of domesticity.

Glögg

As in so many things, anything we can do the Scandinavians can do better – and despite its faintly unappetising name, their take on mulled wine, glögg, somehow conjures up visions of cosy firesides and log cabins, rather than plastic beakers and sticky pub carpets. Unlike the glühwein sold at kitschy German markets up and down the UK, which is strikingly similar to our homegrown stuff but twice the price, glögg has its own, rather fearsome reputation, largely thanks to the strong spirits which lace most versions.

Cocktail king Dale deGroff, "widely acknowledged to be the world's greatest living bartender", according to his book The Craft of the Cocktail, takes his recipe from Los Angeles' Scandia club, whose members included Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, so what it lacks in authenticity, it makes up for in celebrity provenance. I pour a bottle of red into a large pan along with raisins, flaked almonds, cardamom pods, cloves, cinnamon and orange peel and leave it to stand for 24 hours before warming gently, adding sugar to taste, and finishing off with a generous amount of vodka. I'm not too keen on the vodka, or the soggy almonds, and the lengthy infusing time has given the glögg an unmistakable hint of cough syrup. Still, those starlets will drink anything.

Festive flavours

Jamie is characteristically casual on the exact details of his recipe, urging his readers to "feel free" to add their own favourite spices to the pot too. I, however, take the liberty of removing the vanilla pod, which works in tandem with the sugar to make the whole thing rather sickly, before adding cardamom pods, in a nod to the 14th-century recipe. A dash of ginger wine gives the whole thing a kick of spice – although you could substitute a pinch of ground ginger instead if you don't keep a bottle handy for medicinal purposes.

Although I like the idea of using honey, I find it has a rather assertive flavour which clashes with the wine itself, as does soft brown sugar – plain white caster sugar is the best option here I'm afraid.

Serve this with a proper garnish, and a dose of festive cheer, and you'll find it warms the cockles of even the sourest Scrooge this Christmas.

Perfect mulled wine


Felicity's perfect mulled wine. Photograph: Felicity Cloake

Makes about 12 servings

2 unwaxed oranges
1 lemon, peel only
150g caster sugar
5 cloves, plus extra for garnish
5 cardamom pods, bruised
1 cinnamon stick
A pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
2 bottles of fruity, unoaked red wine
150ml ginger wine

1. Peel and juice 1 orange, and add to a large saucepan along with the lemon peel, sugar and spices. Add enough wine to just cover the sugar, and heat gently until the sugar has dissolved, stirring occasionally. Bring to the boil and cook for 5 – 8 minutes until you have a thick syrup.

2. Meanwhile, if you're serving the mulled wine immediately, stud the second orange with 6 vertical lines of cloves, and then cut into segments to use as a garnish.

3. Turn the heat down, and pour the rest of the wine into the saucepan, along with the ginger wine. Gently heat through and serve with the orange segments as a garnish. Alternatively, you can allow the syrup to cool, and pour it into sterilised bottles for use at a later date.

Andy... now that I see that you're connected... I drank Rioja and Ribera yesterday... I liked both

I have a soft spot for Rioja - the tempranillo grapes, the distinctive prescence of oaky flavours and tannines, the berry-flavoured bouquet, ... simply delicious!

One can buy very afforable Rioja wines - but every now and then, one should treat oneself with the delicate pallete of a more mature cru!

Like other things which can rely on a relative form of scarcity, the price of a bottle of wine is to some degree the object of speculation. Especially in the high end cru market. It's particularly popular by Chinese and other Asian nouveau riche, even to the point where you have banks offering specific credit-formulae up to several hundreds of thousands of euros for those who wish to invest in wine.

This has lead to what is considered to be a Bordeaux bubble - millésimes of Bordeaux that were auctioned to prices far above what is considered to be realistic for some years in a row. It is expected prices will come down again as the Asians are starting to find out that if you bid on a recent millésime, you're not actually seeing a bottle of it for the first 2 or 3 years. And since wine is an important status symbol to them, they're just not willing to wait that long.
Another side-effect is the ridiculously overdone popularity of a 1982 wine - I think it's a Bordeaux as well but would have to check. If you happen to have an empty bottle of it lying around, it can easily fetch several thousands of euros if it's still in good condition.

All of this is of course rather absurde - but all in all one should conclude that people who have truckloads of money as a rule of thumb tend to be really absurd.

That being said, I do value the craftsmenship behind wine a lot - just as I appreciate a fine brewn beer, a delicate olive oil or a good perfume.

Berger & Wyse.

pinhedz wrote:Haven't tried this yet, and I'm reluctant to--no vintage.

But it's not just under $8.00, it's under $5.00.

You may just have a bargain there.

pinhedz wrote:Haven't tried this yet, and I'm reluctant to--no vintage.

But it's not just under $8.00, it's under $5.00.

What's the alchohol percentage?