re: On average, how much do you spend on a bottle of wine?

I buy most of my wine online from Casemates and de Négoce. Sometimes you get a dud but in general you get well made wines at <$20 bottle that beat anything you’d get off the shelf at the grocery store in the sub-$40 range.

Casemates is a daily deal site that sends bottles ahead to the community so there are unbiased tasting notes/reviews on the message board for whatever wine is on sale that day. The catch is that you usually have to at least 3-6 bottles at a time, or a case to get the best price.

Négoce is Cameron Hughes, he simply buys wine from oversupplied producers and sells it under his own label. He under NDA so can’t say where the wine is from - but he tells you varietal, location, vintage, and oak program, which once you know your tastes is all that you need to know anyway. So it’s a bit of a mystery. As one poster alluded to, many producers are willing to sell him their extra wine on the cheap to maintain the illusion of scarcity and continue to sell their wine at premium prices. Also as Cameron would say, wine is not expensive to make, it is expensive to sell.