Wine Supermarket

Supermarkets now also wine stores, for all intents and purposes. Most states in America allow the sale of wines and beers and even hard liquors in some cases in your friendly neighborhood supermarket. Some of them, in fact, have quite large selections of wines both domestic and foreign.

How to shop for wines in a supermarket is not really all that difficult to learn. First, you have to figure out what you want. Do you want inexpensive Californian wines that come in large bottles or in boxes (inside of which they are in plastic bottles) or do you want wines that come in the traditional bottles with corks in them rather than screw-on tops?

There are many wines that come in large bottles – which used to be the gallon-sizebottles but these days (with the slow advance of the metric system) they come in 4 liter sizes. The Carlo Rossi Paisano, for example, is quite a delicious red reminiscent of an Italian Chianti. If you just want a table wine, you can’t go wrong with these 4-liter bottles of California wines that come in a variety of colors – red or white or rosé.

But if you are more into wines of the traditional bottles with the corks in them, why your supermarket is still a veritable wine merchant, if you will. California wines have improved a great deal throughout the last five decades or so, so that now a bottle of California Pinot Noir rivals its French counterpart. Today, there are quite a few wines that sell for around $10 a bottle, and you really can’t go wrong with them.

Even wines from Australia – which have been rather popular for a while now – such as your ubiquitous Shiraz, for example, cost around $10 a bottle. So even with today’s troubled economy you can have a decent bottle of wine that you may even be proud to serve to the company or to take with you for the host or hostess you have been invited by.

The selection of foreign wines is also excellent in a supermarket. You have your French and Italian and German wines there, but also wines from lesser-known wine countries – Spain or Portugal or even places like Hungary (who make more wines than the old Tokay that the country used to be famous for – which is, by the way, a sweet dessert wine like a port, for example).

The fact is that if and when you are in the market for a good bottle of wine, you don’t have to leave your favorite supermarket to get it. The only time you’d have to do that is if you lived in a state that won’t allow the sale of alcoholic beverages in a supermarket. Most states do allow this, so you are pretty safe in most of them when it comes to buying your wines in a supermarket.