The $100 Wine Challenge

Cynthia and I have been educating ourselves about wine over the last few years. We’ve enjoyed the occasional trip to our local Italian restaurant which offers a modest corking fee when you bring your own bottle to enjoy with dinner and we’ve especially enjoyed exploring local wines when traveling to Spain.

As part of our ongoing education we have been visiting Spec’s and have the services of a knowledgeable young man by the name of Gerald. He has been giving us good advice and has come to know what we like and don’t like in regards to wine and has been very helpful to us. We’ve taken to calling Gerald our “Wine Sherpa” …

Gerald has been very good about making recommendations about wine that fits our budget, which is in the $15-$20 per bottle range. We’ve occasionally bought more expensive bottles for special occasions or to have on hand and we’ve also had some very tasty $10 bottles.

Since we know it’s quite easy to spend $100 plus on a single bottle of good wine we came up with the idea of finding $100 worth of good wine in the form of 10 bottle for $10 or less. The concept has a lot of appeal to me as 10 bottles of $10 wine will stretch quite a bit further than one bottle of $100 wine. This would also serve as a gauge of our Wine Sherpa’s skill in suggesting wine for us. We told Gerald of our plan and we gave him one week to think about it before returning to his store to let him pick out the wine.

When we arrived at the store yesterday Gerald walked us around and presented us with 10 bottles he thought we would enjoy.

In the spirit of absolute honesty, there is one bottle in this batch that was closer to $11 but the rest were under $10 and the whole purchase came out to $100.74

Over the next few weeks we will be sampling the choices made for us and writing our thoughts about each one and posting them here.