An Idiot's Guide to Buying Wine

I am an idiot.
Here is my guide to buying wine.

1. Spend at least £5
Why? Maths. Maths says that tax is horrible. Every time you buy a bottle of wine, before you have actually purchased any of the wine, you need to buy the bottle. The bottle, according to the government, should cost you around £2.50 in Value Added Tax, excise duty and having fun tax. That means that if you buy a £3.50 bottle of wine, you are actually only buying a £1 bottle of wine. If you buy a £5 bottle of wine, maths says it is 150% better than the £3.50 bottle of wine, even though it only costs around 45% more to buy. Even an idiot (me) can see that cheap wine is going to be horrible. Above £5-£10 you aren't going to notice the difference so much, so if you don't know your way around that price range you may not benefit from spending more. So don't.


2. Read the label. Both labels
Why? Because some wines are obviously shit just from looking at them. Look at the wines in your local chain pub - they look shit - and you don't need to drink them to know they taste awful. If a winemaker hasn't bothered to make a decent, refined looking label, they've probably put no effort into the wine. This applies to almost everything in life. The phrase 'don't judge a book by its cover' is absolute guff in the case of a) books b) wines c) almost anything you can buy in a competitive marketplace. The label on the back will probably tell you a lot more than the label on the front, and is always worth reading. It might be in French, in which case you need to go away, learn French, come back, read the label, and then decide. It might equally be in Spanish, in which case they're idiots and should've put in English as well.


3. Buy a grape you like, or want to try
Why? Because everyone's palate is different. However, drinking the grape you want to drink may not be so easy. Some wines are clearly labelled 'merlot' or 'sauvignon blanc' but many more are not e.g. Rioja is not a grape, it's a place, and you can get very good wines made from tempranillo (the main grape in red Rioja) which will be called something else. European wines are much less reliable at giving you grape types, so you may need to invest some research to know what you're buying or have bought. I'm sure there's an iPhone app for it, there's one for bloody everything else. Try new types as well, just because you once liked one wine, there is with absolute certainty a better one waiting to be found, and you'll never find it if you stick to that reliable Cabernet Sauvignon every time.

4. Think about the vintage
Most wine, especially red wine, is drunk too young, and therefore doesn't taste as good as it would if it had been left for a while. Decent reds probably want to be two years old, except for Beaujolais which is always drunk young. Don't buy a Rioja from the last couple of years and assume it to be any good, it probably needs to age. Whites can be drunk younger so there's less to worry about here, but there are still interesting differences between the young and old. As a massive generalisation, older wines are more complex and more subtle, but only good wines will age well. Usually if they're selling it to you and it's more than a couple of years old and under £20, it's ready to drink but may well also keep. Some wines will tell you when you can drink them - next time you are in a Marks & Spencers read a few of their bottles.

5. Buy more wine
This wouldn't be an idiot's guide to buying wine if it didn't recommend buying more wine. The more different wine you buy, the more experience you have, the better your own instinct for picking the right one will be. Some people even recommend deliberately buying an appalling wine now and again just so you can really appreciate the good ones. Personally I prefer just to vomit heavily and lick that for an hour or two and then drink a nice wine. You can really appreciate the complexity of a good Shiraz after a plateful of sicked up curry.

You were (possibly) not an idiot before. Welcome to the club.