Whats a good beginners wine?!
Answers:
Stay away from sweet wines - it's a terrible way to get into wine. Good sweet wines go great with desserts (or for dessert), but that's about it.
Stay away from the 2 best known wines - Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay.
I'd say you should try a California/Australia Syrah/Shiraz or a California Zinfandel (not white zinfandel). At the grocery store - look in the $6-10 range. If you have a Trader Joe's or Cost Plus World Market available to shop at - that money will go further and they both have really great wine buyers, so you can find nice wines.
Syrah/Shiraz and Zindfandels tend to be the kind of wines called fruit bombs - they are big and chewey in the mouth and taste intensely fruity. They are not actually sweet at all, but because of the fruit and the typically high alcohol level, they seem sweet.
It will be much easier to go from them to something else, than it would be if you started with actual sweet wines.
It is good to start with a sweet wine like white Zinfandel. Get used to the flavors, this is a very basic wine. Then perhaps on to sauvignon blanc. Stay in the whites for a while. Pinot Noir or Chianti are good starter red wines
Chardonnay or any of the champagne grape wines.
Of course, if you like you could just get good quality champers but there's not much point and it can cost the earth and it's not much better.
