Ballin’ on a budget pt. 1: Bold reds

I have to admit that I’ve gotten a little tired of the buzz about cheap wine. Yes, there’s plenty of delicious wine in the $10-20 range, particularly from emerging wine regions. Yes, theoretically, boxed wine could be great (although I haven’t tasted one yet). Yes, certain expensive wines offer more hype than quality. That said, wine drinkers who label anything over $10 as overpriced as as wrong as the snobs who say you can’t get good wine for under $50.

Wine quality and its relationship to price is a touchy subject. When I write about wines on the more expensive end of the range, I know I risk alienating everyday wine drinkers. There’s a good reason many wine writers tend to write with the assumption that the average person approaches wine with fear, if not outright hostility. Wine can bring up uncomfortable feelings about class, money, and education, and the more expensive wine gets, the more skittish beginning wine drinkers—or those without the time and energy to study wine—often feel. And this tends to translate into dismissal of non-budget-priced wines, because the alternative is admitting ignorance or inexperience.

I’m not going to tell you that the quality of wine correlates exactly with its price—because it doesn’t! A lot of factors affect the price of wine that have nothing to do with its quality, like labor costs, utility prices, climate, automation, and (of course) hype.

That said, wine is like any luxury good in that—while the price doesn’t tell you everything about its quality—it does tell you something. In the same way that clothing designers can make a much better leather jacket for $500 than $50, a winery with a higher budget will be able to make a higher quality wine. With a $100-per-bottle price tag, a wine producer can buy better land, grow at lower densities, use only the best quality grapes of the harvest, vinify the wine using more costly winemaking techniques, and age it as long as they need to. With a $5 bottle price? A winemaker is lucky to produce something drinkable, let alone good.

What about those wines between special-occasion-expensive and day-before-payday cheap? Unfortunately for wine novices, these wines vary greatly in quality, with many underperforming and overperforming for their price point. Fortunately, that’s where I come in. In this series, I’m going to review wines in a range of prices that deliver good value for their respective price range. First up: bold reds.

Ballin’: San Felice Estate Vigorello ($70–80)

Obligatory what’s a Super Tuscan? explanation for wine newbies. You can skip this paragraph if you’re a pro. Basically, in the 1980s, Tuscan wine producers started to grow wine grapes that weren’t native to the region, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, and Syrah. Rejecting Italy’s strict winemaking laws, these winemakers began making wines under PGI labels (TL;DR, less restrictive labels that usually carry a bit less cachet than more restrictive labels like, say, Chianti). These wines tended to be made in less traditional styles, and often featured ripe fruit, new oak, and big, bold flavors.

San Felice Estate’s 2018 Vigorello is—for lack of a better word—a big boy. You get a lot of plush red fruit on the nose, but unlike a lot of wines made in that infamous, hard-to-define “international” style, that’s not all you’re getting. (Forgive my cynicism. I’ve just been to California and my palate is tired of overripe fruit. I’d hate to see more European winemakers adopt Americanized practices to please stateside taste buds.) Notes of earth, garden herbs, and cedar come through as well. On the palate, you’re immediately greeted by bold, but fine tannins and flavors of tobacco, black pepper, leather, mushroom, and baking spice.

I’m happy to say this wine manages to straddle the border between the pleasing ripeness and use of international varieties that made Super Tuscans famous and the traditional, reserved style Italian winemakers have thus far been able to preserve. Vigorello’s blend includes not only international varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Petit Verdot, but the native Italian grape Pugnitello, rediscovered through a partnership between San Felice and the University of Florence.

semi-ballin’: Domaine de Pasquiers Gigondas ($30–40)

The southern Rhône remains one of my favorite regions for the comparative value of its wines versus other French regions, and its subregion Gigondas almost never fails to deliver. (For the noobs: it’s zhee-gon-DAHS, and like most Rhône reds, it’s made from Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvedre.) The subregion produces robust, high-alcohol wines that can nonetheless surprise you with their complexity and elegance.

Domaine de Pasquiers makes wines across many price points, but one that I particularly liked was their 2020 Gigondas. The most prominent note on the nose is brambly blackberry—in fact, it reminded me vividly of picking blackberries on the side of the road as a kid in Oregon. 2020’s hot, dry growing season means its ripe, accessible, fruit-forward style is the main draw of this wine, but its acidity, full body, and elegant tannins balance these flavors well.

budget: Château de Ribebon Bordeaux Supérieur ($10–20)

Basic Bordeaux is hit or miss. At worst, you get a simple, inoffensive, moderately tannic red that gets you where you need to be when tackling a steak. I don’t tend to buy a lot of Bordeaux in this price range because another $10 or $20 can buy a lot of flavor. Why skimp on an okay wine when you can get a good-to-great one for a few bucks more?

That said, I was surprised by Château de Ribebon’s 2016 Bordeaux Supérieur. It was a random why not try this, it’s cheap find at my local wine shop, but I actually went back to get another bottle after I’d…let’s not say “chugged,” but…enthusiastically consumed the first one. With its bold, smooth tannins and concentrated black fruit, pepper, earth, and spice notes, this vintage is just about ready to drink.

Scarce information is available on the Château itself, other than the moderately fun fact that it was originally King Louis XVI’s hunting lodge. Whatever its origins, this is cheap Bordeaux at its best, and you don’t have to know a Bordeaux from a Claret (as Basil Fawlty would say) to appreciate its quality-to-price ratio. Drink it on a rainy weekday evening while watching one of those spooky British mysteries.

Next in this series: sparkling wines on a budget and not-so-budget.