Bargain Betty: Plump for plonk

An empty bottle of wine has been sitting on my desk for the past few months to remind me that it's feasible to buy a perfectly drinkable or even premium wine for less than $10.

A while back I was having guests for dinner so bought some cheap plonk to deglaze the chicken as the recipe required. To be precise, it was an $8.99 Matai Peak Hawke's Bay Merlot, from Pak'nSave Mt Albert.

It didn't really worry me if the wine wasn't top notch because I didn't plan to serve it to my guests.

Like all good cooks everywhere I doused the chicken with the specified amount and then poured myself a glass. I was pleasantly surprised that it appeared quite drinkable to my cook's palate.

Intrigued, I Googled the winery "Regency Ridge". There is no such winery. The only clue I got from the label was that the wine was bottled for Regency Duty Free.

I wondered whether I'd chanced on an expensive bottle of wine being discounted. I turned to a viticulture consultant friend, who suggested three possibilities for the wine's origin, all of which are common practices:

1. Some enterprising person has bought bulk wine at a cheap price then packaged and sold it to the supermarket.

2. A winery had offloaded surplus stock under a label that will not damage its primary label or brand.

3. The supermarket had wine packed for its shelves.

I put in calls to Foodstuffs, which owns Pak'nSave, and JR Duty Free, which won the Auckland Airport duty-free licence from Regency.

Foodstuffs told me that Pak'nSave Mt Albert had picked up a couple of pallets of this wine cheaply. JR Duty Free said the drop had been bottled for a promotion by Reliance Wines, which supplies high-quality, private-label wine. The trail went cold there because this bottle wasn't from Reliance.

Nevertheless, Reliance and a wine broker I called said no high-profile company would have surplus wine bottled and sold in its name. Companies have reputations to uphold.

There are many ways to cut your wine bill. One is to buy mail order from catalogues such as Blackmarket.co.nz, make your own, or my favourite: don't buy it. But the moral of this story is that you can't assume a sub-$10 bottle of wine is gut-rot. I'll certainly be taking a closer look at Pak'nSave's wines next time.

diana@bargainbetty.co.nz