Blog Master G

It’d been about 4 months since the last Saratoga Wine Club #8, the economy was in the toilet, and cheap wine was in the air. So on February 22, 2009 — yes, I’m blogging about an event only a month old! — Jen and I hosted Wine Club #9: Recession Edition.

The mission: Find a bottle of cheap yet good wine. We devised a formula that would reward cheap wine that still scored well. Some tried the opposite strategy — bring an expensive bottle and hope the high scores would carry you — but it backfired. In the end, the two cheapest wines reigned victorious: Two-Buck Chuck (now $2.99 a bottle, thanks to inflation) secured the #1 and #2 spots.

Jen cooked up some delicious eats, we tallied the scores, and Annette & Todd’s Charles Shaw Cab secured the win with the highest milliliter score, which factored in volume of wine to calculate the ML Score by taking the average score and dividing it by the price per ML. They took home the $30 winner’s prize with an ML Score of 1,158 (each participant contributed 5 bucks to the pot). Alexis got second place with 1,119 ML points and a $15 prize with her Charles Shaw Chardonnay. And in third place with a $5 prize was Justin’s $3.99 Renee Barbier Mediterranean Red with 1,041 ML points.

As for those pricier wines? They got no love from the ML Scores. Sarah & Eric brought one of the more expensive wines of the evening, hoping the high scores would boost their bottle, but in this cheap wine contest, there was no such luck. Their bottle of Sterling Sauvignon Blanc, which happens to be one of my favorite wines, got last place by ML Score with 334 ML points.

View more photos here and check out the score sheet with the ML formula here (you can see actual wine scores and random comments on the second worksheet).