...you are the typical wine snob...you know nothing about Portuguese wine...
where I live,I get very good quality wine at very cheap prices...I like it,END OF....blindfold me,give me a wine that is 100 quid a bottle and one of my local ones for 1.20 euros....yeah...the more expensive may be a little nicer,but really in the grand scale of things,it's not THAT much better....we just don't produce wine that is awful,simple really ...and unlike Spain,if you go to a local restaurant and have the house wine...it's good!!!,really good!,for 2 euros a litre jug....god I hate people who think that prices make something good...wake up and smell the roses!

Hey, Touchy. I didn't knock Portuguese wine. Just said you using that as your barometer didn't fill me with confidence. I am glad you feel free to 'hate me' because my opinion differs to yours. I am also curious as to how well you know my knowledge of wine from various regions as to give me such a glowing reference!!!!

However, given that I will say this. I like a hamburger. I LOVE a Burger King. I know it's crap but I like it. Yet I can appreciate the differance when an Argentine Novillo is put on my plate and I would not expect to pay the price of a Whopper for it - and if that was the price advertised I would not trust it.

You are clearly a person - sorry for the personal generalisations but as you opened the floodgates... - who just thinks wine is an alcohlic drink, just as someone else might see beef as merely a food. It doesn't matter the quality as long as you like it. Good for you. Personally, if I'm going to drink just any old crap just to drink, I'll go with a cheap beer. If I want to drink something that will tickle the tastebuds, and will compliment the food I'm eating at the time, I'll choose a wine appropriately. And this does not mean going for the €100 bottle. There are loads of excellent wines out there between €5 and €10.

I don't think I hate you!
My point is...it's not crap!!!! just because it's cheap,it doesn't make it crap,I live in the middle of a huge wine producing region,so of course it's cheap....that doesn't make it crap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'd bloody kill for a burger king

I've always found the house wine given with menus in Spain to be perfectly palatable - often better than the "cheapo wine" you get in UK supermarkets. If it wasn't the restaurant would soon find the locals boycotting the place. Local wines can often be surprisingly good, even if they don't travel. However it is true that if you want a better wine, then ask for Albarino, Rueda (for whites) or Rioja, Ribera, Navarra etc. Incidentally (a bit of a side track) I've found the best tapas in Spain to be found in Valladolid (yes, I've been to both Catalunya and the Basque country, but the tapas in V were far superior, at least to my taste), and I put it down to the fact that it's situated in or close to the best wine producing areas in Spain.

Heres a nice little guide for you.

http://www.thewinedoctor.com/regionalguides/spain.shtml

Check out what your Spanish wines you have found would cost you in the UK. Prices shown are per case.

http://www.nickollsandperks.co.uk/search.asp

Your guide to Valladolid where the nosebag sounds divine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valladolid

Got some Argie "Beyt Hayayin Chardonnay" for a € a bottle from a friend in the right place and it is the dogs goolies.

Ooh er.....
(1) Good idea it being a sticky. Someone take note. At least two of the wines in this thread were in one I started yonks ago, we're to some extent all repeating ourselves (must be all the wine & burgers)
(2) Ahem. I don't think very many of us think it's the price alone that's the most important thing. Also I think as (was it Cleri) said, given a nice wine to complement food you can certainly tell the difference. But being expensive, whether 5€, 10€ or 35€ & above, doesn't necessarily make it nice
and the same goes the other way.... being cheap (and yes, you can get a half decent glug at less than 2€) doesn't necessarily make it crap.
Additives appear, unless some actual expert tells me differently, in ALL non-organic wines so it's not as simple as that. Sure there are crap bricks. But I've tried the blind trial game with OH, who's a Protos fan. That Dominio del Fuente from Carrefour - while NOT fooling him it was a Protos, nor even really a true Ribero del Duero - DID gobsmack him for taste/price. Mind you having said that I suspect the latest offering isn't as good as last year, I had two glasses last night & can feel it this morning, not as smooth by a long chalk.

(3) Liria, Mercadona -
(4) If money was not an issue for you and you could drink gallons of the most expensive wine (without necessarily knowing the price and going on taste alone) you would, said Forty. Well that's probably true; but money is an issue (even when you've got a few bob in the bank, sometimes being careful's how it got there) and as with buying your Aston or your Kia, or whatever it is, you have to weigh up pros and cons and for many of us the pros are value for money - obviously you could say for taste alone, a 20€ Ribero or whatever would give you stonking value. However 20€ is a meal, or even two. (or three) So you pays your money & takes your choice. And I'd rather drink Carrefour at home & pay over the odds to have something better/special when we go out, thank you very much!

Oh and btw, 'the reality is it is substandard. End of'. Has anyone ever done you a blind trial Forty? Lidl beer rocks!

Btw#2 - Novillo? if you've not tried bife de chorizo or bife de lomo or asado de tira on Argentine soil you don't know you've lived! (foodsnobs of the world unite

We are too hissed off with the wine snobs.
We buy our wine from the neighbours for about 1 € a bottle. There are no chemicals or additives in it. It is no reserva just a good honest young wine.
if you want to see a definitive wine guide to Spain this is the best link we have found.
http://www.espavino.com/index_en.php

I'm with Cleri on this one.

I live just half an hour away from Soave and other well known Veneto wine making towns. The soave wine is cheap because it's local, it's not cheap beacuse of an inferior quality.

You go buy a bottle and try it. I suspect they've priced it wrongly. Believe me - I know my wines and this one is an absolute bargain.

Good post Fiona, we did blind wine tasting where I used to work, one evening every 3 months, everyone would buy a bottle of wine wrap it in tin foil and then we would taste each wine and talk about it and rate it on a scale from 1 - 10. Most times the cheaper wines won out, there are some fantastic wines out there for everyday drinking, day to day JFB and I go for wines that cost up to 2.50 but we have been known to push the boat out on special occasions. As I have said before a good wine is based on the fact if you like it then it's good, no matter how much you pay for it.

Back home in the UK, in Morrisons the wine was 10% off for 6 bottles, occasionally we would buy 6 bottles and when we got home open a bottle whilst putting the shopping away. Then we would open a second bottle, just to see if it tasted better or worse, then a third............it usually progressed to having crackers and cheese with the wine and the shopping took ages to put away. We always had a laugh and even had a score sheet for the wine, ranging from 1 (bad) to 10 (good) after a few glasses though we changed the scores as the wine tasted better the more we drank

Novel way to put the shopping away. I must try that.

I usually tell myself to get a job done first and then and only then treat myself to a nice glass of wine.

I must try it your way in future. I'm sure it makes a lot of household jobs last much longer but be far happier in the doing.

We only did it occasionally....when the devil was looking over my shoulder

yeah - I was just thinking ................ you either drink a bottle very quickly .......... or you are very very slow at putting the shopping away ............... or you get sidetracked