Tips to Take to the Wine Shop

The wine store is a very distracting place. The walls are lined with colorful, fancily-fonted labels that each seem to be saying "drink me, I'm delicious" in their own special way. There's a time and a place for aimlessly perusing the shelves (we'll get to that later), but most of the time, you don't want to be distracted from your mission-finding the best bottle of wine for the given occasion. Which means you need to properly identify the occasion: Are you buying wine for a home-cooked dinner date? A conversational dinner party? Or a boozy rager? 

If there's food involved, consult the chef, or do a little research on what would go well with it. You can frequently find great, inexpensive food wines from France (look to Côtes du Rhône and Bourgogne for both reds and whites) and Italy (look to Tuscany and Chianti for reds; most Italian whites pair well with food as well). If it's a party, you might want something with a festive, colorful label or name that people will remember-you'll find plenty of these in the Australia and New Zealand section, where you'll also find plenty of wines with twist-off caps, which are great for parties.

There are obviously many exceptions to this rule. Definitely do spend more than $12 if you are: buying a gift for your boss, proposing to your girlfriend, or ... well, that's about it, really. Thanks to modern technology when it comes to growing and harvesting grapes as well as in the winemaking cellars, there is more really excellent wine out there, from all over the world, than ever before in history. (Global warming has been a big help, too, if you believe in that sort of thing.) And that mean you don't need to spend a lot for a good bottle of vino. 

If you want great juice in a cheap bottle, there are certain regions you'll want to pretty much skip altogether: Napa, Bordeaux, Burgundy and Piedmont, to name a few. There are incredible wines made in those places, but you're going to have to pay through the nose for them. Look to the New World for the best wines for a 10-dollar bill: Argentina, Australia, Chile and New Zealand. And there are plenty of affordable wines from France, Italy and Spain as well. Look for bottles from the Loire Valley in southern France in particular.

Seriously. Just do it. Most wine stores have at least one dedicated manager on duty whose job is pretty much just to help you find the best bottle in the store for your purposes and in your price range. In fact, many take delight in finding you an even better bottle for cheaper than you intended to spend in the first place, or will mark down a more expensive bottle just so that you can try it without breaking your budget. It's in their best interest to make sure you find something you like and want to come back. The value of having a local wine clerk that knows your tastes and knows you're a repeat customer can't be overstated. No one knows the inventory of the store better than that guy, and you don't even have to tip him!

So you're too cool or too shy to ask the manager for help? Just like the GPS was essentially invented for men who refuse to ask for directions, there is a rapidly growing list of wine apps available for download on your smartphone for free or a small fee. Check the backs of the bottles on the rack, too, for QR codes which you can scan with your phone for tons of information on the winery and the wine. Even if you don't have an app to guide you through the store, there is so much information on wine available on the Internet these days that a quick Google search of any wine name will instantly retrieve wine reviews, price comparisons, etc.

Depending on how frequently and where you shop for wine, you've most likely come across the sample stand, when a local brand rep for a given winery spends her afternoon smiling and handing out free samples of wine. Unless it's something you obviously have no interest in-we're looking at you, whipped cream-flavored vodka-check it out. There's a good chance you might find out you like a new wine grape or region, and you didn't have to pay the price of admission. Additionally, the wines that the rep is pouring are almost always steeply discounted that day.

Ten years ago, you might have gotten a dirty look for bringing a wine bottle with a twist-off cap to a party. Today, hosts in the know should prefer them. Not only are twist-off caps much faster and easier to open (the trick is to grab the base of the foil capsule around the bottle neck, not the top of the cap like you would a soda bottle, and then twist the base of the bottle) than wines under cork, they are also a much more reliable closure. Corks can be infected with molds and bacteria that can spoil a wine, or rob it of its flavors-you've probably had plenty of tainted wine without even knowing it, just think the wine was bland and flavorless. With aluminum screw caps, there's no risk of a bad bottle.

While the reputation of the twist-off cap for a wine bottle has come a very long way in the past 10 years, the same cannot be said for the bag-in-box wine, which is a shame, because there are some damn fine ones out there, and they're incredibly cheap, too. Look for the octagonally-shaped line of box wines called Octavin, Black Box brand, and the 1-liter TetraPaks of Bandit brand wines. If you're feeling self-conscious about drinking from a box, find a nice large crystal decanter and just set that on the table. Let your guests tell you what a great wine you picked out for a few hours before you tell them it came from a box. Or don't.