It’s buyer beware when finding bargain wine on the web, says Don Kavanagh.
I'VE BEEN drinking a fair bit of wine over the holiday season, as is the custom.
Certainly there are bargains to be had in the supermarkets and wine shops, but I've also been dipping into online wine buying, specifically from daily deal sites, with some mixed results as to the quality.
The great thing about these sites is, of course, the low price.
For around $50 you can get six bottles of New Zealand wine delivered to your door, which sounds like a bargain and it is.
Unfortunately, the problem I’ve found is the variable quality among the bottles I’ve received.
Take, for example, the six-pack of chardonnay I received recently.
It contained two each of three different wines, of spectacularly different quality. There was a lovely, fresh, biscuit 2011 wine from West Auckland that went down like a dinner, but the other two were hardly what you’d expect when ordering local chardonnays.
One was 9 years old and, although it had interesting age characters, it wasn’t up to the mark.
This wine had a plain white label containing the vintage, varietal and winery it came from, which led me to believe it was from a batch of sparkling that had gone wrong.
It certainly tasted that way.
But although that wine at least had some intriguing characters going for it, the last wine was most definitely the least.
It was a 2008 vintage and, at 5 years old, was showing a shocking level of deterioration. I imagine the wine was intended as an early drinking style, but the winery ended up with excess stock and palmed it off on the daily deal site.
So, out of six bottles, two were pleasant enough to share with friends, two had some interest to wine geeks like me and two were foully undrinkable, so the value attraction starts to pale right there.
Effectively, I paid $25 a bottle for two nice wines, a price-to-quality ratio I could easily have bettered in even the most expensive wine shop.
I took care to examine subsequent deals more closely and noticed a lot of the wine on offer is older stuff, so it’s a good idea to weigh up the cost against the likely quality of what you order.
In a wine shop, you can get advice from the staff as to what a wine tastes like and if it’s faulty you can simply return it for a refund.
It’s a bit harder to do that online, so my advice when buying wine that seems really cheap is this — if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Caveat emptor.
