I’ve had a few glasses at various places, but I’ve never gotten the names of them. I want some of the good, yet inexpensive stuff. Recommendations?
I suggest you go out to a wine tasting convention or you’ll be hacking up names and not even know what kinds of wine you like. Many wines require a taste for them that cannot be developed by reading posts.
The best starting point I can give you is this: The kind you liked was probably red, the kind you hated was probably white, and stay away from sake if you’re in this for taste.
Beyond that you can make it as complex as you want, but I wouldn’t bother teaching yourself to distinguish between anything more specific than the major types of red and white. Beyond that is pretty much homo territory.
Red wine with red sauces, white wine with white sauces. Red wine with beef and pork. White with fish. Chicken depends on the aforementioned sauce rule.
There’s a lot of very good, pretty inexpensive wines from Chile, Argentina and Spain. If you like whites, Château les Eymeries Bordeaux Blanc is one of my favourite cheaper wines, with melon and citrus flavours and a surprising amount of body for such a light white; it’s from France and only costs less than fifteen dollars, with tax, last time I bought it. There’s a great rosé (pink wine) from Chile called Oops Carmenère Rosé, which is also a really easy name to remember because it is preposterous. I usually prefer red wine, personally, so there’s more directions to go with that. Senorio de Barahonda, from Spain, costs about ten dollars and is a very dark, full red, but berry and vanilla flavours make it interesting. The BenMarco Malbec costs about twenty dollars, and comes from Pedro Marchevsky, whose wines are normally very expensive. Domaine des Terres Falmet, which is like eleven or twelve dollars, is an excellent, lighter French red with a very summery taste, it’s got a lot of tannin flavour, but the tannin is pretty mild with the apple-strawberry overtones of the wine.
I usually buy go for around 3-5 years old, a little less on some whites, a little more on some reds.
Learn this.
It’s how you can tell your guys from enemy agents.
Now that takes me back. Unfortunately, I ended up fucking up the corking process, so most of the wine went bad. I think I ended up with about 11 bottles, about 3 of which got drunk the same night I bottled them (it didn’t taste too bad actually, just sort of like spiked fruit juice) but it didn’t get us nearly as drunk as three bottles of wine purchased from the store would have. Unfortunately, I never got to try it again cause I moved away soon after 
I wouldn’t usually insert myself into a thread like this, but I feel like it. More so, I’m tempted to side with Hades’ thoughts on this…
Yeah, I’ve had sake and it just isn’t my thing. I’ll probably give one of the red wines that Arac mentioned a try. Thanks all.
Actually, Plum Sake is quite good. My best way to describe it is it’s like an alcoholic cupcake in liquid form. With wines, I suggest the really cheap off-dry red ones or the blush (pink-colored) wines since they’re sweeter.
It all tastes the same to me. Red I noticed had higher alky content and will thus get me drunker quicker (on the rare occasion I do get drunk from wine), so red wine wins.