The Wine Curmudgeon’s Guide to Cheap Wine

Regular readers of this blog know my buddy, Jeff Siegel, aka The Wine Curmudgeon. We are co-founders of DrinkLocalWine.com, the website that became a movement (or at least anticipated one). Jeff is the Eugene Debs of wine consumers, always championing the little guy who buys wine once or twice a week at the supermarket and rarely pays more than $10 a bottle, rather than the wine collector who spends the equivalent of a mortgage payment each month on wine. Let the magazines of the “winestream media,” Jeff’s favorite bête noir, chase after those people. Jeff is happy with his more numerous, if less affluent, readers.

Jeff writes primarily about cheap wine not because he prefers it but because he can afford it, the same reason other people do. He doesn’t equate cheap with bad – he sniffs out the inexpensive wines that are well made and provide exceptional value, and puts them in his “$10 Wine Hall of Fame.” He knows there’re a lot of crappy cheap wines out there, and that many people drink them. He just still respects those people, and that sets him apart from most wine writers.

Jeff is now hard at work on a new book, The Wine Curmudgeon’s Guide to Cheap Wine. It will include a lot of the wit and no-nonsense wisdom that infuses his daily blog posts, with advice on how to navigate the aisles of your wine store to find inexpensive values, how to read a wine label (not as easy as distinguishing “chardonnay” from “merlot”), and much more. Publication will be in late spring or early summer, in ebook and traditional print editions. Here’s Jeff describing the project in his own words:

 

And he needs our help. True to form, Jeff is not going with mainstream media to produce his book. He’s raising funds to cover production costs through Kickstarter, a Web-based program affiliated with Amazon to help aspiring authors and other entrepreneurs get, well, kickstarted. For $25 you can help Jeff defray his costs and reserve your copy of the book. There are also other pledge levels with incentives, just like NPR. He needs $8,000 by February 19. As of today, he has $3,090 pledged.

Think of it as Bordeaux futures for the cheap wine crowd. For the price of two-and-a-half bottles of wine, you will get advice that will help you save money every time you enter a wine store. I’ve made my pledge, and I’m looking forward to my autographed copy of The Wine Curmudgeon’s Guide to Cheap Wine.