I receive calls and emails from persons and organisations that need recommendations and guidance for making wine purchase decisions. They might need the wine for an event, for a client or just simply something to go home with that day. I am always very happy to assist and point them in the right direction. Where I get stuck sometimes is when I get a call like this: “Hey Chris, I need a few great bottles of wine for some very important clients, what do you recommend?” One of my first questions is usually about their budget.

“See what you can do between J$500 – 900”; I’m told. Then there is silence. “If you were in the USA, would you be spending US$3.00 to 5.50 per bottle for that same client?” A resounding NO is usually the answer. Most persons have no idea of the price of wines.

Taxes on wines

This is where I get into the long explanation of how the pricing of wine works in our country, the fact that the taxes on wines are very high and that in order to get a decent bottle of wine, especially as a gift, you really need to be spending a little more money. To help advise persons about the whole idea of wine pricing in Jamaica, I tell them to take the price of any wine they would buy in North America and double it then do the exchange rate conversion. Let’s take the very popular Yellowtail wines, most varietals sell for an average of US$6.00 in American supermarkets, so following my math, US$6.00 x 2 = US12.00; $12x 86 = J$ 1032 + GCT. Go check it with a wine that you know. The majority of that uplift is the compounded government tax, the other components include shipping, handling, insurance and clearance costs.

The price of a really great bottle of wine

Like most new wine drinkers, when I got ‘into’ wine while living in the USA I would be in the supermarkets testing out every $7 and $9 wine trying to find the flavour and tastes that I liked. It would be several months into my wine journey that I found that I needed to be in between 15 to 30 to start to explore and discover really great wines. Occasionally a great value wine in the $10 region will come on the market, but if it’s really good, it’s highly unlikely that it will remain at that price for too long. So a pretty decent US$15.00 wine in the USA would be in the region of J$2500.00 on our shelves.

There are very drinkable, unsophisticated, reasonably good- value wines in the below J$1000 price category, but if you need a special gift or a great wine for dinner this weekend, you really should be considering a budget of between $2000 to $6000 per bottle.

Does price indicate quality?

To further the price discussion, Lascelles Wines and Spirits hosted a tasting of its Hardys wines and we pulled three different priced Shiraz from those selected and did a ‘brown bag’ blind tasting to conduct an experiment to see if price matters. We wrapped red wines, all Shiraz, priced from J$800, J$2000 up to J$15000 per bottle in brown paper bags and let the patrons try the wines – blind. Guests were given each wine to taste with and without food and the results were very interesting. While each person had their favourites, there was a definitive choice before food and after food. The lower-priced, unsophisticated, simpler ‘easy to drink’ wine, Hardys Stamp Shiraz, seem to lead the way before food, but after Gari Ferguson’s Guinness-Braised Short Rib was served, it was a different story. The full-bodied intense and concentrated wine with ripe tannins and underlying oak complexity, E&E Black Pepper Shiraz, stood up to the food and was then voted as the favourite. So does price indicate quality? It all depends.

Cheers! Now go forth and do some of your own price comparisons today.

Chris Reckord is a wine enthusiast. He and his wife Kerri-Anne are part owners of Jamaica’s only Wine Bar – Bin26 Wine Bar in Devon House, Kingston. Please send your questions and comments to creckord@gmail.com . Follow Chris on twitter.com/DeVineWines