Chicago Value Wine Challenge

The verdict is in: Top 50 Wine Values Revealed

by Marc Dornan, dornan@tastings.com

	Wines for McScrooge!

Fifteen dollars can go a long way if you spend it wisely. This was the premise tested by the Chicago Value Wine Challenge, which found the best wines possible for $15 or less. Now we are pleased to reveal the results.

After tasting through almost 600 wines, our expectations have been surpassed. In choosing the top ten wines from a shortlist of 30, our select guest tasters were astonished that they were tasting wines that retailed for $15 and in some cases as low as $7.

Does it not seem like only yesterday that new $100 wines were being launched at about the same rate as IPOs Today, consumers are not, according to industry reports, packing as many expensive bottles into their shopping carts. We hope that the following suggestions will give you plenty of “smart-buys” with which to fill that shopping cart.

The guest tasters that chose the top ten wines were as impressed as we were with the cream of the crop. Top Chicago sommelier, Robert Bansberg, from destination restaurant Ambria, said that it was a "tough choice to pick favorites from this bunch. I frequently thought I was tasting wines priced at $20 or $30. I may even have to consider some of these for my list."

Chicago-based wine writer Tom Hyland, a contributor to The Chicago Tribune and Decanter Magazine, was also taken aback by the the quality of the short-list. "I taste a lot of wines at this price level and what impressed me was that very few of the wines that I tasted were of the formulaic and commercial genre....there was plenty of character and some of the reds could age well. As for the whites, ..... Oregon pinot gris, in particular, was sensational."