There is no absolute answer to finding the best value when buying wine. Indeed, if there was, there would be many fewer bottles to choose off the shelf. Eventually, all you can do is research what you can and then trust your own judgement. Indeed, isn’t that why we have wine societies? You can try numbers of wines and decide what is right for you.

Wine value is a function of both its quality and price. Sometimes this can be difficult to judge. We may know that bottles offered at under £4 by a supermarket are unlikely to have length or complexity. On the other hand, you could find a classic wine costing £100 or more unready, corked or just plain uninteresting. The old adage of trusting your merchant is of little help – if he has bought the wine, he will have to sell it: something that proves unpopular is likely to be offered if you ask for ‘something special’.

Special offers can also be less than honest. Supermarkets have the habit of buying in wines of modest quality, offering it in the corner of an obscure shop for a few weeks at a huge price, then putting it on ‘half-price’ shelves to sell it at the planned margin. This has been notable recently with Californian wines – there is a glut on the market, but only at the lower end: top quality wines are as hard and expensive to buy as ever. Presumably some people, some time, buy standard Champagne at the list price, but for most of the year it is sold at 50% off.

Do you go by the rating systems? Many of them are relatively unbiased by commercial motives, but will tend to be strongly influenced by the personal tastes of the critic concerned. If you agree with them, you might follow their suggestions. Other scoring systems seem just plain eccentric. I regularly taste the Decanter International Wine medal winners, but I find that too many Gold medal winners are disgusting, sub-commercial bottles, whereas many of my favourite wines remain unplaced.

There is a lot of information out there, in print and on the internet. The more comments you find, the better idea you will have about what a wine might taste like and whether you will like it. For a club tasting, you will need to find a range of wines that are likely to appeal to a number of the members. You should also aim to expand their knowledge, with wines out of the ordinary price or area. Even with a modest budget, you could add a very cheap wine from a totally unknown area to balance the purchase of a more expensive bottle that usual. Value is where you find it.

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