If you want to impress at your next dinner party, a great bottle of wine is a good way to do it. However, choosing the perfect bottle can be tricky with supermarkets crowded by hundreds of bottles.
In order to make sure you’re choosing the right bottle, and getting the best value for money Into the Vineyard has offered insider tips to help shoppers spot the standouts from the crowd. With so much to choose from, you’ve got a good chance of getting it right. This chance increases when you know the secret tips about what you should be looking for.
The first tip is to ignore the flashier packaged bottles. While they’re not all bad, show-offy labels and big names often reflect marketing, not quality.
If you look for the more minimalist designs, these tend to signal wines where craftsmanship, not packaging, does the talking.
The back label is important too. If there’s a lot of information, such as where the vineyard is, how the grapes are grown, or the fermentation notes, they are good indicators of quality.
If the back label is sparse, it may be a generic, mass-market bottle of lower quality.
Another great tip is to check which region the wine was produced in.
Cooler regions like New Zealand, Germany or northern France are known for producing crisp, aromatic white wines but the warmer regions of Spain, Argentina and South Africa are famed for their bold reds.
Lesser known regions with microclimates and traditional techniques such as Portugal’s Dão, or Jumilla in Spain will often produce wines that taste far more expensive than their price tag.
In a similar vein, it pays to know your grape varieties. Grapes are the fingerprint of a wine and the more you know about them, the better educated you’ll be on their flavour profiles.
Exploring varieties outside the usual Chardonnay such as Grüner Veltliner, Chenin Blanc and reveals complexity and value that big-label grapes may lack.