Glass half full: “Ooh that’s a bargain”

Few things are more satisfying than finding a great value wine in a little bottle store. This is so satisfying that I want to share it and offer a couple of tips on finding more for yourself.

As a general rule, the best value buy is whichever wine is on special, those stack ’em high promotions really do cut into retail and winery profit margins. But they can be fairly generic options and if a racy Marlborough Sav or a juicy Oz Shiraz isn’t what you’re after you may need to look little harder.

Let’s start with white and look for the hard to pronounce, or unusual varieties, my bargain buy was a Viognier (pronounced vee-on-yay), from a winery I’ve long enjoyed, Coopers Creek. This is from their Select Vineyard range which is created to showcase distinctive, flavoursome wines and at a decent price.

Making it more of a great buy is that Viognier is a superb food wine, a dry white, it has enough texture to match spicy and Asian foods, with a lovely fragrant rose-water nose and stone-fruit flavours that make a pre-dinner glass for the cook as enjoyable as the meal match. It cost me $20.80 and being less popular than say, Pinot Gris, it was a 2015, a few vintages age in the bottle that really filled it out.

If you like the food friendliness of Viognier maybe treat yourself to another, Elephant Hill in Hawkes Bay. Out on the coast in a perfectly maritime setting, they grow and bottle a Viognier that has the flavour element unique to the best Viognier, a slight saltiness, subtle and enervating like the first scent of the beach through the car window. It is subtle, savoury and delicious. Bigger in body than the Coopers Creek it is a white wine with sufficient power to marry any meal.

So two tips for super wine, at a smart price are to go for the less mainstream varieties and look outside the fridge, deep on the shelf where the slow-moving wines hide. You’ll often find a treat, with whites alongside Viognier, go for Gewürztraminer, I’ll keep my eyes open for another good buy and tell you soon.

Glass half full by Timothy Giles

Timothy Giles lives a healthy life, balanced out by his love of wine, especially organic, biodynamic and well-priced wines. He’s here to share his favourite finds with other Grown Ups in a new weekly column called Glass Half Full.

Read more by Timothy here.