Some random tips for buying wine in or out of a recession, just because I'm a swell guy

Over the spring-like weekend in New York City I spent a lot of time walking around. During that time, I caught up on listening to a few of the podcasts I'd downloaded into my iPod over the last few months that I'd fallen behind on listening to. One of them was an episode of Fresh Air that was broadcast on NPR in early December featuring John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter, the husband and wife wine column team for the Wall Street Journal. They offered some helpful and easy to remember insights into purchasing wine. I jotted a few of them down in my handy-dandy notebook (just like college!) and will share them with you now, just because I'm a swell guy like that...

-Avoid all wines that feature animals in the name or product marketing. Just for kicks, Brecher and Gaiter said they did a tasting of all the wines on the market that feature animals on the packaging and they were all "beastly and foul." Get it? "Beastly and foul?" HA!

-For good quality at reasonable prices, you can't beat South American wines, particularly those from Chile, a country that produces such good wines that they said you could pretty much walk down the Chilean wine aisle of your local wine store with your eyes closed, pick any available bottle blindly, and come away with an excellent choice, usually for under ten dollars. Argentinian wines were also highly recommended.

-When you order wine by the glass in a restaurant you are taking your life into your own hands, due to the fact that many restaurants are sloppy about proper storage once a bottle has been opened. It's better, and often more cost-effective, to spring for an entire bottle.

-Be wary of ordering popular wines that you may be familiar with when you're in a restaurant, as they're often outrageously overpriced. The restaurants will often mark these up because diners are afraid of looking foolish by not being able to properly pronounce the names of foreign wines, so they'll order something they can pronounce easy and that they may have tried previously. Take Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio for instance...it's a pleasant-tasting, high-selling wine with an easy to pronounce name, thus, it's ordered very frequently. So they jack up the price, naturally! Can you really blame them?

-When buying wine in a store, try to avoid wines with alcohol contents higher than 13 or 14 percent. Any higher than that and the wine will taste out of balance. Unless of course, you're drinking the wine solely to get drunk. In that case, get the 16 percent alcohol content.

-Probably the best champagne/sparkling wine available on the market today is Cava, which sells for about $8 a bottle. If you're looking to buy champagne, skip spending $100 to $200 on a single bottle of the more prestigious brands and buy an entire case of Cava instead. And be sure to drink your champagne in flute glasses, as the shape allows the bubbles to fully dissipate, which enhances its flavor.

-Finally, and this is one I learned on my own long ago...never order the second-cheapest wine on the menu. Why? Because restaurant owners will often price the wine they buy cheapest at wholesale as the second-cheapest wine on the menu, because people generally don’t order the cheapest wine out of shame or pride or whatever, and thus will often turn to the second cheapest. They price that one higher and get a bigger profit margin in return.

So there you go!