What This Country Needs Is a Good $3 Wine

We chose a table under a tree at the riverfront cafe in Ljubljana and asked the waiter if he had any wine. “Vino, sure,” he said, and dashed off, returning with a bottle of the local Merlot, cork nowhere to be seen.

It was a warm day and we wanted something cold, but not speaking the local language, we accepted the red wine. Within a few minutes, the sun had moved and we were bathed in strident sunlight, so we asked for some ice cubes and added them to the wine. Later, the bill came. The charge for the wine was about $5.

Was it remarkable wine? Hardly. Was it memorable? I never even took note of the producer’s name. Did it serve its purpose? Absolutely, especially because it had little of that mouth-puckering tannin you find so often in young red wine. It was rich enough to hold its own with ice cubes in it, and it went well with a plate of fried calamari.

As we walked back to our hotel from the cafe, my friend wondered why there were so few wines of that type made in the United States. They don’t have to be varietal wines, he said. Good, old-fashioned red and white table wines, such as we used to get in the good old days.

I knew what he meant--I’ll never forget Simi’s non-vintage Burgundy, a modest blend of modest varieties but rich, tasty stuff, and it cost $21.48 a case. I still have a few bottles of it, and every now and then I pull one out for aficionados of the good old days.

Remember when you’d stroll into the local trattoria and order a carafe of some nondescript Chianti? The wine was palatable, occasionally chilled, and cost $6 or $7 for a liter.

We’re not talking about wine with depth and character here. We’re talking about wines that have some flavor and will wash down the victuals with a minimum of contention. Such wines are simply made, like Beaujolais. In France they go by the names Bourgogne Rouge and Bordeaux Blanc, Chinon or Cotes du Rhone. In Italy, they are called Dolcetto, Valpolicella and Bardolino. From Spain, many of the red wines of the Rioja offer this kind of sip.

What would work is a lighter-styled wine made with Zinfandel as its main component. Although Americans have fallen in love with Cabernet, it’s a fairly herbal wine that is usually less fruity and too tannic for a simple quaff with pasta or a burger. And in our passion for Chardonnay, a delicate variety that simply lacks the forceful vinous character that makes decent table wine without the aid of oak aging or some blending tactic, almost no one is looking at Riesling and Gewurztraminer as the base for inexpensive dry white table wine.

It’s true that a number of tasty and well-made generic wines are being produced in the United States, but most of the better ones cost $5 a bottle or more. White Zinfandel is often discounted to $3.50 a bottle, but most White Zinfandel is simply too sweet to consume with food. Pat Paulsen uses Gewurztraminer and Sauvignon Blanc for an excellent wine called Refrigerator White (this year called White House White because of Paulsen’s latest run for the chief executive’s chair), which sells for $7 for 1.5 liters, but he seems to be almost alone.

I recently blind-tasted a number of the $5-plus “popularly priced premium” wines and found most to be worth less than $3. There were fewer technical flaws than in the past; the wines were sound. But the level of residual sugar in the Chardonnays and the utterly lifeless aromas in most of the inexpensive Cabernets left me feeling that California winemakers haven’t yet figured out what Americans want: dry, vinous wine that they can get cheap enough to have daily. (I won’t tell you the “winner” of this tasting because I tried the same wine again at a second, non-blind tasting and found it to be different and not as good.)

I was in a wine shop the other day when a salesman came in with samples of what he said was “a great bargain” in a new Chilean wine he was importing. “You’ve got to taste it,” he said, “it sells for $6.”

“I’ll taste it,” said the merchant, “but I doubt if I’m going to buy it. I’ve got a lot of good $6 wine. What I need is a good $3 wine.”