Cheap wine

Few years ago, I contributed a $7.99 Merlot to a dinner gathering. Like any genius, I forgot to remove the price tag, which was shining bright throughout the room when the bottle was being opened. Everyone seemed to notice it.

Unless you remove the price tag, cheap wine isn't well received, I knew that. I picked up two lessons since -- 1) Never buy a cheap wine; 2) To always buy Yellowtail, the coke of all wines, which is cheap and universally enjoyed. Ravenswood's good too.

So there's a party tonight, and I went looking for a Yellowtail at a nearby grocery store. They didn't have it, and I've already taken Ravenswood there once, so sought an alternate. Nothing seemed pure Merlot -- they had Cabernet mixed with Merlot, Shiraz and some kinda low-fat "vegan" wine. How San Francisco.

Walked up to the store owner, asked him if he had Yellowtail.

"They are having supply problems, for some reason we haven't received a bottle in a few months," he said. He recommended one wine sitting in a box lying on the store corner.

"$6.50?" I shouted, stunned at reading the price of King Fish Merlot, with its cheesy sketch of some random prehistoric fish on the cover. "You must be kidding!"

"It's very good," the store owner said. "I don't drink wine, but it is very good."

"Cheap wines?" I answered, convinced it wasn't a good buy. "And who will drink a wine with a prehistoric bird sketched on the label?"

"Don't judge it by the name and price," storeowner said. "Got a good deal on it, just trying to pass the savings."

He pointed to 5 boxes of ugly King Fish bottles lying on another side of the store. It looked like decoration for a haunted house.

Worth a buy? A good gamble. The party I'm headed to tonight isn't a bunch of wine n cheese connosieurs, so it would be a good King Fish testbed. If people enjoyed it, I'd be able to buy a good wine atleast 1/2 the price of Yellowtail.

If it doesn't turn out to be a success, I dread the consequences...