Wine for me has three categories: daily swill, date or weekend wine and special occasion or collection/library wine.
Daily swill requires it to be under $10 for 750ml, as a two glass a night guy, that is my $5 a day overhead. Weekend wine can go up to $30 and the collecter stuff has about a $100 cieling with some exceptions, but I only buy 4 or 5 a year and prefer to buy $50 wines and age them ten years.
Some of you mentioned my favorite dailies, Menage is my standard, love it. If I have to pick a Yellow tail, i’d go with the 1.5 litre of Shiraz from costco at $8.50 it’s four days worth, so it’s a bargain. I can’t do chuck, just cant get into it. Blackstone is the other fav, costco has the white label for about $11, it is noticeably better than the copper label but even that is a fine daily.
The best daily, combination weekenders are the cameron hughes wines at costco. They vary since cameron is a broker and owns no grapes. He is basically a costco employee and that is the only place you can find it. The Stagg’s leap cab at $12 was a godsend, the lot 16 meritage is still my favorite but my stock is low. The trouble with the camerons is that they arey are all one time deals, when they sell out that’s it forever. Their business model is impressive, no marketing, no advertising, no distributor, every bottle is paid in full by costco before it is labeled and they can sell it for 30-40 cents on the dollar. http://chwine.com/
Their tempranillo is a bit high for a cameron at $21, but a love temp, so I think that is my next endeavor. Don’t screw around when buying cameron, it can sell out forever in a day. I have frieds in different parts of the state that I sometimes call upon to buy me a case when it’s sold out locally. Lately I’ll buy one bottle, run to the car, open it, taste it, and if I like it, head back in and get a case. It may sound crazy but more than once I’ve taken one home and returned the next day only to find out it’s sold out forever. When they are good they are damn good.
