The price of wines

From handbags to cars, price tags often reflect status rather than quality - can the same be said for wine? Adam Lechmere considers the £6.99 rule

During the 2008 Decanter World Wine Awards, the 150 judges considered what they thought was the minimum price you should pay for a bottle of wine. The verdict, on average, was £6.99.

The consensus was that below this, with the cost of making, bottling and distributing the wine – and tax – you’re going to get something very cheap indeed. The original ‘liquid’, as the trade calls it, for a wine on the shelf at £3.99 will have originally cost about 50p a litre. You can guarantee that any oaky taste will come from bags of powder rather than barrels.

There are exceptions, of course, such as the wonderful Cimarosa (below), which costs less than a tube ride. But for the most part, there’s a big jump in quality between £4.99 and £6.99 – usually because those two extra pounds are being spent on the liquid itself. From £10 to £25, in comparison, the jump in quality isn’t so drastic. Experts feel – and this isn’t just wine snobbery – that when you pay more than a tenner for a bottle, the average untutored wine drinker can’t tell the difference.

Numerous studies show that, when given a line-up of wines where cost (but nothing else) is known, people invariably prefer the most expensive wine. When price is unknown, results are much more random.

And the wine professionals? In a blind tasting at Decanter a couple of years ago, the humble Château Pedesclaux (below) was given five stars, while Château Latour and Château Lafite Rothschild, which then were selling for about £900 a bottle, won four and three stars respectively.

In wine, as in handbags and cars, there’s often little correlation between price and quality. Take New Zealand’s Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc. It’s a very good wine – but it’s also the product of the slickest marketing machine in the southern hemisphere. I love it, but don’t think it’s worth £20, which is why I recommend the equally good – and perhaps more interesting – Mud House at half the price.

But it’s not only marketing and reputation that pushes up the price: the other month I was given a wine by a mid to high-end producer – ‘this is our top cuvée, our £100 wine’. The bottle was twice the normal weight, the capsule was hand-moulded wax: the wine was average. As the senior buyer at Waitrose told me, ‘packaging is an area of dubious levels of reality’.

Of course there are wines that are sincerly worth their £50 price tag. Domaine Pouderoux’s La Mouriane (Harrogate Wine), coaxed in tiny quantities from 100-year-old vines clinging to a parched Roussillon hillside, is worth a lot more than its £35. There are even wines worth 50 times that much. If you’re a Shanghai property developer using a bottle of 1989 Pétrus (now retailing at £2,500), to clinch a deal, that’s value for money.

But back in the real world, keep the £6.99 rule in mind. Don’t be dogmatic about it but if you’re paying more than £10, know what you’re getting. If you’re forking out £50, think very hard – would I be better off buying four £12 bottles that I’m certain of?