Learn
Choosing a bottle
Practical tactics for a shop or a wine list when you do not know what you want.
The short answer
Decide what you want it to do first — match a dish, suit a mood, please a group — then work from a style rather than a bottle. Naming what you liked about the last wine you enjoyed is far more useful than naming the wine.
Overview
Start from what you already like and move sideways rather than starting from scratch. If you enjoy Malbec, the useful question is what else is full-bodied and softly tannic — not whether you should be drinking something else.
In a shop, the price band matters more than the region. Below a certain price most of what you pay covers tax, glass and shipping rather than wine, and moving up a few pounds improves the liquid disproportionately. That effect flattens out quickly higher up.
On a wine list, the second-cheapest wine is not a trap but it is predictable. Restaurants often price their most interesting bottles in the middle of the list.
Asking works. Telling someone what you usually drink and roughly what you want to spend gets a better result than any amount of label-reading.
Buying from somewhere that stores wine properly matters more than most people think — bright windows and warm shops damage wine before you get it home.
Where you can see it
- Starting from a wine you liked
- Say what you liked about it — the fruit, the smoothness, the weight — and WineHQ can find wines that share that specific quality rather than merely resembling it overall.
- Starting from a meal
- Give the dish and how it is cooked. A roast chicken and a chicken curry want quite different wines.
Sources
Sources consulted
- WSET educational materials and the Systematic Approach to Tasting — Wine & Spirit Education Trust