Grocery store wine gets a bad rap for being generic, boring and altogether a bit basic, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some goof bottles to be found among the hard iced teas and boozy seltzer. To get the skinny on good grocery store vino, CNET turned to wine manager, Jade Palmer who offers several tips and tricks for finding wines at the grocery store that are more than worthy of your dinner table.
Louis Jadot wines have a French, classic-looking label you can find in many large retailers, but it’s not quite the same as the mass-market brands you should be avoiding, and that has to do with what’s called the negociant system. “Negociants such as Louis Jadot buy grapes and make wine, so they are not a grower, necessarily,” says Palmer. “It’s a class of producer that allows people to enter the market without having vineyard land,” she says, a much more common practice in winemaking than people realize. Not needing to own real estate is one way for winemakers to keep their costs down and pass savings to the consumer.
Excerpt Taken From: CNET
Author: Pamela Vachon