Ah, the infamous Two-Buck Chuck. For those of you unfamiliar with this phenomenon, it's Trader Joe's "house" wine--Charles Shaw. It comes in Shiraz, Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc. It sells for $1.99, only at Trader Joe's. Yes, $1.99. A bottle. Hence the term "Two-Buck Chuck." I figured for $2 a bottle, I could afford to pick up one of each flavor. (This was my first time drinking Two-Buck Chuck, because the New York branches of Trader Joe's were always way too crowded for me to want to shop there.)
Surprisingly, it's pretty good. It's not going to set the wine world on fire or anything, and it needed time to open up, but once it did, I was hard-pressed to find a verifiable difference between that $2 bottle of Shiraz and, say, a $8.99 bottle of Yellow Tail Shiraz. I'm not hating on Yellow Tail specifically--most wines under $10 a bottle taste mostly the same. There are obvious exceptions of course, which is one of the fun things about trolling the bargain bins at the wine store, but it's often hard to tell the difference between two $8.99 bottles of Merlot. For weekday at-home guzzling, Two-Buck Chuck has just significantly reduced my wine bill. Why buy the $8.99 bottle when $1.99 will do just as well?
And hey, it tastes way better than Franzia.
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