[Jayne Osborn]

My husband and I love a nice bottle of wine (who doesn't?) but he will only drink red whereas I like red, white and - occasionally, rosé. (Champagne, which I adore, is another issue altogether!)

My question is, what's a reasonable amount to pay for a decent bottle of vino, given our geographical spread?

Pete and I aren't connoisseurs, but we know what we like. Having just been given a lovely wine rack that holds 18 bottles I went shopping to fill it. Our local Morrisons supermarket had umpteen offers of £12 for 3 bottles (that's just over 6 bucks per bottle) and, surprisingly, the wine was more than OK, ...as far as we can remember! (He told me to write that )

How does this compare with where you are? You generally pay loads more than 4 quid a bottle in the UK, ...but do you really need to, I wonder? Let's face it, a certain snobbery can come into it.

We enjoy Australian, South African, Spanish, South American (Chilean, Argentinian etc) - not Californian so much, however (it's too sweet for our palate).

I await your views. Cheers.

Jayne

[Roger Slater]

I'm no wine connoisseur by any means, and I don't buy a lot of it, but I generally can be satisfied for about $12-15 a bottle, with an occasional foray into the $20 range. The $6 bottles seem to me more suitable for cooking.

[Jayne Osborn]

The $6 bottles seem to me more suitable for cooking.

We cook with French plonk that's around one buck for a bottle (yes, really), from the hypermarket in Calais!

But $12-15 is a fair price, and comparable with what we (mostly) pay here. Twice the price isn't necessarily twice as good, though; I'm really surprised how good these ''cheap'' wines can be.

[John Whitworth]

Sir Maurice Bowra said he always preferred quantity to quality.

[Jayne Osborn]

I've never heard of him, John, but I see where he was coming from... up to a point. I wouldn't drink awful wine merely because it was cheap, though.

[Roger Slater]

I'd rather have quality. Would you rather read five really great poems or a hundred shitty ones?

[Orwn Acra]

A $6 wine is basically Chateau Diana.

[Jayne Osborn]

I'd rather have quality. Would you rather read five really great poems or a hundred shitty ones?

I can't imagine that anyone would rather read a hundred shitty poems than five really great ones, Bob!

But if you're talking about discernment here, that's my whole point - some of these inexpensive wines are surprisingly good. We wouldn't drink any old cheap shit!

We usually open several bottles between Friday night and Sunday night, and the equivalent of a $6-7 bottle - around a fiver - (I'm not saying it applies to all that's on the shelves) is just as good as something twice the price. I used to buy cases online from Virgin Wines and it was delivered, but that was much more expensive; the difference in quality is barely noticeable, if at all.

So I take it you can't buy a fairly decent bottle of wine unless you pay much more than I'm talking about, then? (Chateau Diana doesn't mean anything to me, sorry. Is that cheap "plonk''?)

[Andrew Frisardi]

The wine where I live is very good. And inexpensive. I generally buy it from a local producer, who brings me straight to his vat, holds up the 5-liter bottle, and fills it out of a nozzle like the kind you pump gas with. I get a 5-liter jug of red and a 5-liter jug of white for 20 euros. Another place nearby did the same for 15, but this wine is better. If we want to go fancy, we spend 8 euros for a bottle of high-grade wine, but the gas-nozzle stuff is already delicious. It keeps us happy anyway--gassed, you might say.

[R. S. Gwynn]

When I drank the stuff, I always swore by the Jacob's Creek reds from Oz. Usually $5.99 a bottle. They make a shiraz/cabernet blend that is quite good.