Best Value Entry Level Rioja

Best Value Entry Level Rioja

This is another offshoot of the Bottom Feeder thread

to pick the cheapest wine you’d be happy to drink from Europe’s top regions.

Another great value region that produces great wines that are way cheaper than many other top European wine regions.

I’m not sure if entry level is the right term for these, but what the hell.

Remember, it’s not which one you prefer, but which is the best value.

Why just this $20 Riserva? Rioja around or under $20 is a pretty wide field. I suspect there will be much debate on the choices offered.

Ha! These were the choices of everyone who contributed to thread mentioned above.

It possibly shouldn’t be there, but I’m just the messenger

James, you need a signature that alerts all to your thirst for “bottom feeder” wines.

And an addiction to polls.

LdH Cubillo (it’s their entry level)
LRA Alberdi

This. I know I mentioned the Riscal reserva in the other thread but if we’re talking sub-$20, for me it’s always the Alberdi.

Always found Faustino, Montecillo, M.d.Caceres to be good, along with paying up a bit for Heredia.

+1 for the Montecillo as a bottom feeder wine. It’s a great choice for pizza or pasta in a larger gathering of varied palate discernment.

No I don’t. I did a Legendary QPR thread which had nothing to do this bottom feeding. And why do I need any signature? Looks like you have too much time on your hands.

What’s with all the abuse today? Stay out of my threads if you’ve got nothing nice to say.

The polls are to bring a bunch of choices down to one. I have spread them out so as not to not inundate the board with them.

There’s no accounting for assholes on this board.

Bye bye foes.

Back to the topic…

Sorry, but I added new items to the Fino/Manzanilla poll and lost all the original votes, so I’m not going to add new items to the poll, but more suggestions are very welcome.

I will make a note here that Faustino Montecillo and LRA Alberdi have received 2 postal votes and as counting hasn’t finished, they may be added to the votes (subject to a decision from the Supreme Court )

Wow. I was doing what I thought was some gentle teasing and get called an asshole.

This community is full of information and kindness and generosity. Also humor and we often poke fun at each other. I encourage you to open yourself up to that side of back and forth as well. It will help you feel a part of things.

In the spirit of exactly that, I apologize for hurting your feelings. I should have included a winky face to make the tone more clear.

Happy Holidays.

So it’s only allowed to talk of nice things in your threads which seem to be just one poll after another without much contribution beyond that?

There’s no accounting for assholes on this board.

I thought one was supposed to have only nice things to say here?

Hermanos Pecina would probably be my choice. I like them much better than the others that fall in their price range. I could go either way on whether the LdH Cubillo is a better value at a price 50%+ higher. However, you really want to give LdH some additional time, which maybe disqualifies it from the “entry level” category.

Montecillo is crazy QPR. I think part of what some people might be objecting to about this thread is that you took a handful of posts from another thread and then made a poll here based on a really incomplete assessment of the options. So the poll isn’t meaningful. And even if you had included, say, the 10 top picks for great-QPR Rioja from a broad initial survey, what are the chances that most people reading the thread would have tried them all? So some people would just select what they have had and liked without making the comparison.

There are so many great QPRs in Rioja that crowning one the greatest is unrealistic and unproductive, in my opinion.

You handled this so gracefully. What a nice example. Bravo.

I don’t have anything nicer to say than what the 2 responders posted. But, man, you gotta chill. This is just a board on fermented grape juice!

I’ve liked all the Pecina wines I’ve had, but availability hasn’t been great in my local market, so they’ve kind of dropped off my radar. Thanks for the reminder, though – I should look around again, maybe availability has improved.