About Us...

We are a typical suburban husband and wife with two children, a dog and a cat. We also like good food and, not incidentally, good wine. It is no coincidence that we met and fell in love over gourmet meals and fine bottles of wine. Wine tasting was one of our favorite activities.

Now, of course, things are a little different. We have a basement, not a wine cellar (though we do have a modest wine cooler). Like so many others in our family and financial situation, we are not able to continuously keep expensive wines on the dinner table. We need to do the next best thing: find good value bargain wines that are affordable but still yield a solid measure of enjoyment.

You see, Husband has often been known to bring home more wine than is needed or wanted by Wife. Confrontation ensued...

A compromise needed to be reached. If quantity was to remain high, cost must reduced. But what about quality?

If quality is to be maintained, it requires a search for value.

So we resolved to explore inexpensive wines from around the world. Red wine, white wine and rose are all on the menu. We'll be checking in on the usual wine producing countries like Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the U.S., Chile, Australia and New Zealand as well as lesser known producers from Austria, South Africa and Portugal. We may sample well known varietals like cabernet, chardonnay, merlot and pinot noir as well as wines made from a wide range of less well known grapes such as albarino, malbec, gruner veltliner, cinsault and mourvedre.

It has been a never-ending search but now we would like to write about what we discover and share it with others. On Talking Cheap Wines we'll do the wine tasting for you and tip you off about the good wines and the bad wines. It is our contention that fine wine doesn't have to be expensive so the wine bottles we sample will all be in a price range we think of as cheap.

What is cheap?

By cheap, we mean under $15 per bottle though many of the wines we discuss will probably cost considerably less.

What is value?

There are two aspects to value. First, does the wine taste good? Cheap wine doesn't have to taste cheap or nasty. Second, is it worth the money? Could we have found a similar tasting wine for a lot less money? Could we have found much better tasting wine at the same price? These are subjective criteria but we'll give you our opinion.

There are so many wines in the world and so many wine producing regions that there are always bargains to be found. Our intention is to share our experiences as we try inexpensive wines from around the world. We hope we can point you to some of our favorites.

About our Ratings

Taste - we compare the wines we write about to the universe of inexpensive wines. So if we give a wine a 10 out 10, that doesn't mean it is as good as a $1200 bottle of Bordeaux. It means that for an inexpensive wine it is darn good and would bring pleasure to anyone who is not a total wine snob.

Value - once again, the comparison is to the universe of inexpensive wines. Consider it a taste per dollar rating where taste is defined as described in the preceding paragraph.

Enjoy! And remember to drink responsibly.

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