Top Ten Santa Margherita Alternatives - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Nothing draws the ire of a wine geek like someone coming into a wine store, asking for a big box brand like Santa Margherita, then being sneered at by a label conscious customer when we recommend something better and less expensive.
In fairness, their logic seems fairly sound on the surface: Santa Margherita is the best selling brand of Pinot Grigio, and it's expensive, so it's got to be the best value.
What does this wine geek know anyway? He's probably just trying to stick me with something that is not selling.
Channeling Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction: Allow me to retort.
Just because McDonalds is the largest, most well-known, most profitable restaurant conglomerate on planet earth doesn't mean you will get the best meal there. When Ray Kroc first made his hamburgers from scratch, they were made from what was then organic steer meat, and hand baked buns. They were tasty. So he sold a ton of them. After a while, he needed to expand and modernize so this spiraled to what is now the end product: A "burger" made up of 15% (at best) meat that came from an industrial feedlot."
Similarly, when Santa Margherita first rose to prominence, they made really good pinot. After a while though, demand outpaced the vineyard's previous quality standards. Yields got larger and larger, so the flavors became more and more muddled.Next they started buying bulk juice from other vineyards to keep up with their rising sales. (Nowadays they would probably buy juice I made in my bathtub.) So as prices kept increasing, ($19 a bottle WHOLESALE!!!!) attention to quality degraded. (It sucks.)
"Oh yeah? PROVE IT."
OK here's my list of 10 wines that blow Santa Margherita away, for a FRACTION of the cost.
Call me out.
In April 2017, CNN Travel came along on our Arthur Avenue Food Tour. See it here >>>