Paula Kornell Brut is what keeping me from popping a nice sparkler on a Tuesday
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My wife and I probably only drink a bottle or less a week just by ourselves (which is what I associate daily drinkers for) so a long time ago I made the decision to drink less but better.
I have a “special wine” grouping ( which isn’t a money thing), a drink with “x person” grouping, a not ready yet grouping and everything else grouping.
Anything in the everything else pile is fair game depending on what I feel like or my wife asks for. That’s any and all bedrock, most Germans, LdH (Rose and old Blanco are specials), myriad under the big guns, non GC Burgundy, most of my Rhone, about a third of my champagne etc. Might be $25, might be $95 or $125. If it’s ready, not really special and not earmarked for having with a friend or group who will get outsized enjoyment from it, it’s fair game.
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Are you all opening wine to drink casually a few times a week?
For me, the frequency is inextricably tied to how I think about my daily drinkers. In my house, we open a casual bottle or two, on average, about every other week. So, I plan about 2 cases of red and 2 white a year to drink casually. Given that, I buy house wines that are somewhere around $100 on average for this.
If I were daily drinking 25 cases a year, my price point would most likely be different.
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A still moving target for me. Until several years ago, $15 - $25 was probably my sweet spot. Right now it’s more like up to $40. But at this stage of my life, bottles costing more than that are fair game to pull anytime, not just for special meals or celebrations, but any day of the week or any meal.
Carpe Diem.
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Some of these things can obviously be true at the same time - we open what we want, when we want, without rules around how much a “Tuesday” bottle can cost, versus a “Guest” bottle; and at the same time, have a set of wines we mentally group as daily drinkers. The entry point for those is around $25, I’d say, with still rosé and a few others (I’m looking at you, Vallana) coming in between $15-20, and house champagne more like $35-50.
The frequency of drinking is part of the equation, as others have said. We drink just the two of us with dinner (and sometimes with weekend lunches) probably 3-4 days a week. We don’t always have the attention span for a significant bottle. Another point for us is availability. A daily drinker needs to be something we can get in quantity. We aren’t very interested in one or two of anything at that level (expensive bottles are different), and one of the great pleasures of daily drinkers for us is having wines we know intimately, can count on, love returning to. For us, there is nothing boring about this. I have heard people say they get bored with “the same wine again and again.” I could certainly see that if you were drinking only that every week, but I have trouble imaginging getting bored with a wine you drink perhaps once every couple of months, among many others. In any case, we don’t get bored, and love having stocks of familiar, beloved options in the cellar.
Finally, I could not be farther away from Ben’s point here.
I get that space constraints have a lot to do with that, and we are even if they didn’t, there’s nothing wrong with it. For us, though, there’s something deeply satisfying about discovering those wonderful wines that are priced like daily drinkers, available in quantity, and worthy of signigicant cellar time. So many more inexpensive wines improve with 5ish years or more than people think. Even our house champagnes we rotate each reload to be sure we’re drinking those with 3 or more years on cork. Having the space to do this is a blessing, for sure.
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Damn, so perfectly stated. Like for me, on every single point. That’s how I drink, except perhaps more often. 
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The Surgeon General will require new strip labels, “Daily drinkers are hazardous for your health”. Special occasion wines only from now on.
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We don’t drink very often, maybe a couple times a month, but I have a under counter wine fridge in our kitchen that I keep stocked with our house wines that my wife knows she can pull from whenever we need a bottle for guests or whatever, stocked with 17 Hudelot Noellat Bourgogne Rouge, 17 PYCM Bourgogne Blanc, and Krug 168.
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It used to be more often for us, and I’ll be the first to admit I prefer it that way. Dinner without wine seems incomplete to me. Getting old sucks.
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For me “daily drinkers” are in the $15-25 range. Sometimes I’ll go a bit higher, but in general, I can find a lot of things in that range for week nights where I want a couple of glasses of wine while I cook and eat. I think my reticence to go higher is more based on age than money.
I also agree with Sarah about aging daily drinkers. There are a fair amount of wines I buy in this price range that I prefer with a few years of age and don’t mind aging them. I don’t buy a lot of case lots, but I’ll buy six bottles of something to drink over 3-5 years. So I might hang onto some of them, but in my mind they’re still daily drinkers and they’re still things I don’t mind opening mid-week even if I’ve let them sit for a few years.
Most of us who cellar wine have no shortage of wines that need 10-15+ years from the vintage, but I always find myself needing more wines that hit their stride about 3-6 years from the vintage, because sometimes I prefer wines that don’t require a lot of attention to “special” wines. There are a ton of wines in my daily drinker range that fit this and I try to ensure I always have a good supply of these around.
I said this in another thread, but I don’t consider these wines to be cellar defenders. I don’t drink them to ensure I don’t drink special, aged bottles. I drink them because I genuinely love them and they’re wholly satisfying in the moment (sometimes more so than an aged, “special” wine).
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So much of this resonates with me, Bill. Thanks for posting.
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Yeah I also don’t really agree with the not aging daily drinkers thing. One of the reasons I chose those wines as “house” wines is that I have a lot of them, and despite not opening them very often, it’s actually very interesting to see how they develop with some bottle age. I was lucky enough to get a bunch of those 17 burgs at extremely low prices (I think both bottles are at least 2-3x what I paid at the time), and the 17 Hudelot has gone from a charming youthful burg towards middle age, while the 17 PYCM still has crisp acidity but has rounded out from being purely mineral driven. It’s pretty cool to see their development.
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Yes. Too good for a random weeknight and not good enough for a birthday dinner.
After my dad passed and I inherited a metric ton of stuff in that range I have had to alter that stance.
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Thanks. Sorry to hear about your father.
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My daily drinkers were $16 Seghesio Sonoma County Zin, $15 Cotes du Rhone and Firestation Red before I met you enablers. Now the avg bottle price in my cellar is $46.90 and the 3 wines I’ve opened in the past 5 days have been $90, $50 and $60 respectively. 
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My daily drinker is Zin. Price point between $25 -$75 depending on producer
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This is so true.
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As I’ve been itb for almost 5 decades, what I pay for a daily drinker is not the price on the shelf.
In general I pay ~$15 for wines that are ~$25 - 30 in a regular store (wine geeks can and do find better prices than the person wandering in from the street).
I drink wine almost every day, with sporadic dry periods from a day to a week. I’ve cut back from 4 glasses a day to 3.
As I want to taste every wine that has ever been made, there aren’t many that I buy in quantity; my cellar % of singletons is probably much higher than most.
My everyday whites are heavily skewed towards Bourgognes and Macons, with Chablis and Santa Cruz Mountains the next step up.
Languedoc and especially Roussillon wines are my every day reds, as these have been a big part of my business, plus I love them. Cotes du Rhones and Riojas play a big role. I love inexpensive Bordeaux, but like it with bottle age, which limits what I can find easily. Bordeaux, Bourg, Castillon, up to satellite Saint-Emilions at 5 to 10 - 15 years (better) are ideal for winter. Also Graves (both red and white).
I am looking for suggestions for under $30 regular retail whites, Sauvignons and/or Sauvignon / Semillon blends that are rich and opulent but balanced. These are winter-weight white go-tos for me, but when my company dropped Argentine wines, I lost my favorite source. Chaleur Estate and Merry Edwards are favorites, but they are past my ‘everyday’ price point.
Good thread, thank you David and thanks to all who are contributing.
PS: I’m a big +1 on the ‘getting old sucks’ idea, but not when I consider the alternative.
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This is a great thread. It’s very interesting and helpful to read about how everyone approaches this, from a practical, budgetary, health, and frequency perspective.
For me, @Bill_Schneller, @Sarah_Kirschbaum, and @MChang summed it up best - I’m trying to get to the point where I have a steady rotation of daily drinkers that have aged a few years in the bottle. In the meantime, I need some bottles to hold me over.
What prompted my original thread was frustration with recent purchases. I don’t want to pull from my existing stock yet; I’m waiting for those bottles to hit their stride in a few years. So I go to the store to look for something in the under $30 range. But shooting blind, the last few times I’ve been sorely disappointed by how flat my pick was.
Thankfully, this forum has given me lots of promising options to try.
As a PSA, the 2021 Hudelot-Noellat is on sale at Zachy’s for $45: https://www.zachys.com/wine/bourgogne-rouge-hudelot-noellat-2021-750ml-536857.html
Even better if you can stack the deal below.
my daily red and white drinkers have risen to $35.00-$42.00 per bottle. of course with exceptions. We do drink a lot of roses like Nervi Rosato that are under $30.00