How To Buy Affordable Wine

We picked 10 wines for less than $100 total and scored both hits and misses.

As the economic crisis crunches budgets, the good news for wine drinkers is that the affordable-wine category is more robust than ever. According to the U.S. Wine Market Study from market research group Impact Databank, wine that retails for $10 per bottle and under constitutes 66% of the U.S. wine market’s roughly $30 billion in annual sales.

But how to choose from all the colorful labels and friendly-sounding names? Walking into a discount wine or liquor store, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.

To come up with some helpful advice, I took $100 and bought 10 bottles at a discount wine store. I picked five whites and five reds (the total, with tax, came to $97.97), then had master sommelier Richard Betts, co-founder of Betts & Scholl wines, taste each pick. Betts makes and regularly tastes wines from some of the most prestigious regions in the world. Among my selections, Betts found a few pleasant surprises and a couple of disappointments.

In Depth: 10 Wines For Less Than $100 Total

Video: Master Sommelier Richard Betts Rates The Picks
Know Your Place and Year
The strategy that proved most effective: knowing when a good region had a great year, as was the case for Bordeaux in 2005. A great resource is wine writer Jancis Robinson's vintage list.

The store I patronized offered several well-known Bordeaux selections from 2006, but an unfamiliar label, Château Tour Biggore, was the only 2005 bottle, and cost a mere $8. This turned out to be Betts' favorite wine of the 10.

Italy is also widely regarded to have had a solid 2005, so the same strategy was successful with the Tato Montepulciano d'Abruzzo ($8). Betts didn't like the cheesy label with its black background and graphic of a mosaic sunburst, but he did like the contents. "It's simple, country Italian wine--you would mistake this for a $30 Valpolicella," he observes.

Going with familiarity also resulted in good finds. That is, if you've had a wine from one producer before and liked it, you'll probably like one of the other wines it makes. French negotiant Jean-Luc Colombo offers wines costing from $9 to more than $90, which tend to be consistently good. The Cotes-du-Rhone Blanc ($10) turned out to be a safe bet. Betts liked the wine for its "pretty peach, apricot and orange blossom" characters, as well as its "stony minerality."