In this house we work in politics so we have to learn how to, as the kids say, ball on a budget (do the kids still say that?). Hence today’s post. You all know I love rosé–enough that I own multiples books about the pink wine, all of which say that a bottle of rosé that can still be excellent even if it’s pretty much bottom shelf.
I’ve wanted to put this claim to the test for a while (okay, let’s be honest–most of the rosé I drink isn’t super fancy) and host a tasting party to figure out what the best cheap rosé really is. Lucky for me, I’m a host for the Lounge and they let me host a gathering to do just that! I asked everyone to bring a bottle of cheap rosé of their choice: the only guideline was that it had to be $10 or less. (I also provided a few bottles and a cheese plate since we obviously need snacks if we’re going to be tasting like seven different wines.)
Wowowow did people deliver. Everyone showed up with a bottle to share with the group (and most people were able to stick to the budget, though we did have a few $12 bottles since apparently Whole Foods does not understand that the people demand cheap rosé) and we got straight to the tasting. Since this was a journey to find the best taste for cheap, we did not do the whole wine tasting with cards to take notes on to pick out the different notes and tones in the wines. We basically just had very small pours of each wine (separated with cheese in between) and then discussed whether we liked it or not.
The general consensus was that when you’re going for something cheap like this you basically just want it to be easy to drink. Nothing too sweet or too acidic. We also learned that chilling is a necessity when you’re dealing with cheap rosé–it really is a game changer. All of our favorites were bottles that had actually been chilled for an appropriate amount of time (so maybe we’ll do another tasting that controls for that variable). And, surprisingly, our least favorite bottles were the two $12 bottles! Apparently you either have to go real cheap or really expensive to make this work.
And finally, since I know this is really why you’re all still reading, we decided that our favorite cheap rosé was a bottle I had randomly found at Costco! A steal at $8.99. Unfortunately for everyone I was too excited about the gathering to take pictures of all of the bottles so I’ve forgotten what the label said (major fail) but the experience was definitely worth it. It was such a fun night that I’m thinking about doing it again with all Trader Joe’s rosé options since they’re pretty much the masters of cheap wine offerings!
Have you done a cheap wine tasting? What’s your favorite or go-to rosé option?
xoxo,
J
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