I’ve known several people who appear to know a lot about wine, and who like to share that knowledge. Unfortunately, each of these experts had the same trait: They turned out to be assholes.

We had a neighbor like this at our old house. The first time I met him he stopped by with another neighbor we were just getting to know, as we were unpacking boxes from the move. He picked up a bottle from a box, took one look, and said, “Well, I see you like the cheap stuff.” It went downhill from there.

But, the asshole was right. I’m not an oenophile (turns out that’s the fancy name for a wine lover, and yes, I had to look it up to remember the word) by any means and I can’t tell you the first thing about why one wine is better than another. What I do know is that price hasn’t told me much about whether I’ll like a wine. I’ve had $100 bottles that were awful (and yes, some that were great), and $4 bottles that put a big smile on my face. What I can tell you is that I felt great about the money left in my pocket after I’d bought the cheap stuff and enjoyed it, and I didn’t feel bad at all if I bought a cheap bottle and ended up pouring it down the sink. I can’t say the same about the expensive bottles.

A few years back I went on a mission to find cheap (less than $10/bottle) wine, because I kept reading about the health benefits of red wine. But that experiment was interrupted by all the things we had to do during our move to Maine, and I lost all my notes somewhere. That quest for decent cheap wine was the reason I had the box for the asshole to find and diss, but during Covid we just drank the stuff without remembering to keep track of what we liked, and about all I remember is that we both liked Apothic Red (which now costs about 4x what we paid for it when the experiment started).

So, this is now “Cheap Wine Quest 2”, which started because I was in Trader Joe’s with Kate and saw that they had several wines under $10/bottle, which is about as much as I’m willing to spend if I might end up pouring it down the drain. The difference is that now that we live in Maine it takes almost two hours to get to a Trader Joe’s so I’ll buy a case or so each trip, and this time if a neighbor stops by and makes asshole comments I’m going to tell them to take their pretentious, puckered ass down to the end of the driveway and not bother to come back. That’ll save us all a lot of time and aggravation. On the other hand, friends and neighbors willing to join us with a sense of adventure and with their inner asshole in check are more than welcome to join in.

I plan to add a picture of the label for each wine we try, while keeping information about each in a Notion database so I have some hope of not losing it. I’ll add a link to that once we’ve tried a few wines and have something to report.