[quote=nocommonsense]
hahaa, my thinking exactly. If a person was told from the beginning that the $2/bottle taste was the best, then that $2-wine would be selling for $100 a bottle and vice versa now.[/quote]
$2 wine is made from inferior grapes. Just the the grapes that go into a middling bottle of Merlot cost more than $2. If TJ or Stater Brothers can make profit on $2 wine, they are getting surplus grapes which are sold at a big discount, most likely because they are “off” in some way. Maybe the acidity is off. Maybe they didn’t ripen enough, and the winemaker has to add sugar or HFCS to get to 13%.
Now, if we’re to compare $10 wine against $100 wine, that is a different story.
A bigger problem IMO is that people are taught that there are only a few “true” styles of wine. And everything else is carried only by specialty shops in low volume. You’re asked to sense subtle differences between $10 Merlot and $100 Merlot, or between different kinds of Riesling, but I bet that half of you have never even tasted, say, Barbera, or Orange Muscat, or any kind of red dessert wine.
