Quote Originally Posted by CageyH View Post
Château neuf is normally over priced, compared to the equally good Vacqueyras and Gigondas IMHO.
There are also some cracking wines from the local area of Fronton and Gaillac.
Yes, that's true

The other thing that's worth mentioning is price. Barry listed some pricey bottles earlier, but if you know what you're buying and get it right, there's a MASSIVE difference in quality between, say, a £20 bottle of wine, and ones for a tenner - almost as much as there is when going from a fiver to a tenner...

Beyond the £20 mark though, improvements are generally more subtle, and when you get to £50 and above, you need to ensure that you're not just paying through the nose for a bad vintage from a 'fancy name', which could be bettered for half the price! Do your research and only pay big money for fine wines, for the best vintages, as that's where the rewards are, and the results can be mind-blowing, if not very wallet-friendly!!

A good tip though, for getting maximum 'slurp-per-pound', when buying wine from specialist wine shops on the high street (my favourite way to shop for wine, as I love browsing through all the bottles), is to look for wines without a bar code. Quite often wines from very small producers don't have barcodes, as they haven't been through the UPC/EAN coding system, but can be utterly superb and offer excellent value for money, ably competing with wines at two or three times the price!

So if you've got a good independent wine shop in town, and use it, bear that in mind, or ask a member of staff if they have any wines from very small, specialist producers without barcodes, as that's often where you'll find some stonking bargains!

Marco.