Here's a secret: If you are a savvy shopper, you can regularly find wines that are relatively close to the "fine" wines in quality--at a fraction of the cost. But you have to be smart, because it's tough out there. A veritable sea of swill beckons your hard-earned cash. A typical medium-sized wine store has 1,000 to 2,000 bottles of wine, and 60 to 70 percent of those cost less than $15. Are all of them great? No. Finding a great wine bargain (GWB) is like looking for a pecan in a bowl of peanuts. If you try to taste your way to success, you will discover that maybe one in ten is good enough for you to take it home, and maybe one in 50 is what you would consider a "great wine bargain." Now do the math. It cost you $150 to find the good bottle and $500 to find the GWB. Plus a headache. And your time. Maybe you should have just bought the expensive wine to start with. But we'll fix that.
We start with a network of experts: wine professionals, restaurateurs or experienced tasters whose palates we know and trust. Then we buy the wines they recommend and taste them against one another. We require that they retail for $15 or less and that they be widely available around the country, so we don't have you looking in frustration for some little gem that made it to only five stores in all of the United States. The best wines from this process make it to Ryder's List. They are GWBs. By the way, not many do, which narrows our list of friends and experts!
A final word about availability: You may not find every wine in your favorite store, but you should be able to find them at another store in your town. Or your merchant can order them for you. If that fails, search the Internet. They are there.
Tom Ryder is the former chairman of the Reader's Digest Association and co-owner of The Cookhouse restaurants in Connecticut, and has been a wine aficionado for decades. He's been lucky enough to taste many stellar wines in some of the finest wine regions of the world.
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