The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on Buying Good Wine at the Right Price

Saturday, July 11, 2015 featured , wine label design , wine labels 0 Comments

You're probably guilty of it, just as I am. You're trying to decide what bottle of wine to buy, but you're not a wine expert. So how on earth do you know what type of wine is going to impress your host or guests.  So, relying on just visual clues, you just grab a bottle with a great design which you think will look good on the table. Simple fact is, most of us will buy a bottle of wine because the wine label looks good, don't worry you're normal!

From the point of view of wine manufacturers though, their job is to sell to the mass market, sorry if you're not a wine expert then that's you.  So they'll be wanting to sell you a bottle of wine around £12. So the tricks they use is to create something fun and whimsical. In this sense the wine label is a bit like a book cover.  It has to grab your attention first before saying something about the wine.

Experts will always say whatever you do, do not buy wine just because it has an amusing or pretty label. I read an article, somewhere, if the wine label is eye-catching, with great design, it most likely indicates a lot of effort and expense would have gone in to the production of it. This is because the wine is worthy of it. Flip it around though and it could be the wine is so lousy the wine label has to make up for it! Let's face it, lots of tricks are at play to get us to part with £12 or even splurge £50 on what we perceive to be an expensive bottle of wine.  When in fact the bottle of wine could be worth only about a fiver.

I love contemporary design.  I love simplicity.  Sometimes a wine label can simply be bold text on a white background with a play on words and I'm hooked.  But equally, I'm also suckered into beautiful, traditional design. Gold foil or embossing, for instance, I immediately associate with sophistication and quality.  So I think I should pay more for it.

But, there are a few tips you can apply to buying your next bottle of wine which prove the quality of the wine regardless of label design.  Let's face it, you want your guests asking for more wine, not wincing as they sip it!  So here's a cheat sheet of my top 5 tips for selecting a good quality wine at the right price -

1. Check the wine back label. See if the wine is produced and bottled in the same location.  This information is actually important. If a vineyard is proud of the wine they produce they will bottle it themselves so that they can see the entire process from start to finish has been accomplished to perfection.

2. Check to see if there is a small indent at the bottle of the bottle.  The bigger the indent, the better the wine will be. The indentation is called a "punt".  The "punt" indicates the aging process of the wine.  The longer the aging process, the better the wine.

3.  Simply match your wine with your meal.  Different wines go much better with different foods.

4. Make sure your bottle of wine is corked.  Simple fact is, screw tops usually indicate cheaper wines.

5. It's fact, the most popular wine regions in the world are Italy, France and Spain.  These countries simply produce the majority of the bulk wine in the World and of the best quality. So you'd do well in selecting a wine from any of these three regions.