a matter of actual taste for once
I am currently drinking a very good €3 bottle of white wine that I bought at the grocery store.
As a matter of habit (and a matter of taste) I usually drink natural wine. Good, artisanal stuff that you certainly can't get at the grocery store and certainly not for €3.
But, as so many people have asked before, why spend €20 on a good bottle of hard to obtain natural red when you could spend €3 at the corner and have an experience that's just as delicious.
After all (haven't you heard?) they've done double blind taste tests that prove even sommeliers can't tell an expensive bottle from a cheap one.
There are many answers to this question. Of course there are. I am not on the side of either. I think drinking cheap wine is fine. I think drinking expensive wine is fine. I just want to drink good wine.
But the reason I drink natural wine is because it's a sure thing. It's a shortcut to good taste. But it's also an insurance policy against bad or boring wine.
Natural wine (in its stricter definition) is wine without any of the bullshit, tricks, and method that you can legally add to wine to make it taste good. No sugar to correct the taste. No sulfites to stop it from over fermenting. Just grapes, nature, technique, and timing. Also, natural wine often does away with /all/ the things that make winemaking easy: pesticides, machines, etc etc.
It's making wine on hard mode. You have to be insane to do it. And so the people that do do it, more often than not, are insane.
Basically, the price of entry to making natural wine is that you have to /really/ give a shit.
So the people that make it are nerds. They're artists and poets and botanists and astronomers and astrologers and weirdos whose only tools are time and the sun and the moon and the vibes and maybe a goat or two.
They do it knowing that it will be painful and that it's likely that it won't work. That it is painful and often doesn't work is what dictates the price most of the time. What you are buying is more of a sculpture made of soil than it is a drink.
Anyway. The point is that when you select out like that - when you know that the only people doing something are the ones who really give a fuck - then the products that you end up with are often worth giving a fuck about.
The thing about €3 grocery store wine is that while there are many that are good, there are also many that are bad. It's hard to know which ones are worth caring about and which aren't. And even when one's good. It's really hard to tell why.
If I go back to the grocery store and want to replicate my experience, which part of it should I bet on? The grapes? (Moscatel) Or the region? (Setúbal) Or the winemaker? (João Pires)
But then again. Do I event want a similar experience?
The person who taught me to love natural wine (hi Lisa!) taught me to love it because it's better (no sulfites and no sugar = no hangovers) but also because it's more interesting. It's more artistic. She taught me that each bottle being different is the point. That what you're tasting isn't really a grape, it's an interpretation, it's what somebody did with the raw materials. But most important, that it's something that somebody spent time to really care about making good.
In that way, it's no different to any other act of creation. And if I had to put my money - €3 or otherwise - on somebody, I'm going to put it on the person that cares the most.