Big Brand Taste-Off

You’re on your way to a dinner party and you’ve left the bottle of wine on your kitchen counter and have to pray there’s something respectable in the bottle-shop on the way. You’re off the beaten track on holiday, or it’s a friends’ birthday and whilst the choice of restaurant is cool from a food point of view, the wine list leaves a little to be desired. We’ve all been there.

All the above scenarios tend to involve the “Bigger Brands” of wine. They’re widely available and often heavily advertised and promoted. But do they taste nice and are they value for (not very much) money? This months Taste Task was to look at some of the bigger (and often cheaper) players in the hopes of finding a few gems to either please the pocket during hard times, or just to save the day when higher-end wines simply aren’t available.

The idea was to pitch “3 of the Best” from the Douglas Green portfolio and place them up against another 3 from The Company of Wine People’s offerings. Each of the producers chose which three wines they would field into the taste-off. Unfortunately, the neighbours took delivery of the COWP peoples’ wines and they haven’t been seen since! So, last minute changes were required, and the Taste Team showed fabulous “Dunkirk Spirit” and set off to their local bottle store to buy 3 wines from the COWP stable with just minutes to spare.

So, whilst the “taste off” we envisaged didn’t happen, it’s worthy of note that the 3 COWP wines (Versus x2 and Welmoed Pinotage) were indeed exactly what was available in a “wine emergency” and that in itself is fun and worth investigating.
The Douglas Green wines all hail from the Boschendal stable and have RRP’s of R72. The COWP “team” is more of a motley crew, and it should be pointed out are at very different (lower) price points to their adversaries in this tasting.

True to Taste Team form there are some surprises in the results. By no means are the rankings of the wines equal to their prices. Whilst some very well regarded wines have come in for some flack, the cheapest of the evening (Versus Naturally Sweet White @ R19.19) seems to have done exceptionally well, even with Sauvignon Blanc fans.

Hopefully after this Taste Task you’ll never again find yourself at a loss with the wine list in a chain-restaurant or even the most remote of bottle shops. Indeed you might just find yourself saving a few rands even in the poshest of establishments having gotten the inside track on value-for-money!