I recently had to find cheap wine in bulk for an event.

Where on earth do you start?

If you are just a normal casual wine drinker like me then your experience of different grape varieties, regions, vintages and producers will be a tiny thimble full in the bewildering, aggressively brand led choices out there.

You walk into the supermarket wine aisle and the walls become the Dan Brown cryptex, the wrong choice and you and your guests will end up wallowing in vinegar. Lots of eye catching labels draw your eye, known brands mesmerise you with familiarity and confidence. The Old World French wines sit there elegantly, tempting you with their labels that look more like a wedding invitation from the producer. The possibility of impressing your guests with a relatively unknown Burgundy excites you, until you see the price. Over to New World and you spot Oyster Bay and think it looks like a bargain, until you remember that you have confused it with Cloudy Bay, the brand that demands the big bucks. By this time your head is spinning. Not a wine expert in sight, just a lady who happily tells you that there is a two for one offer on loo rolls.

Exit.

Back home and onto the Internet. You first search for discounted wine in supermarkets, and have some success. Your search is 100% price driven and you have no idea what has forced this price down say from £7.99 to £4.99. Could it be the fact the wine is actually rubbish, or it is just past its best? Is it a blend of average wine tarted up with additives to create a dull predictable homogeneous year on year big brand taste?

You cave in out of frustration and order one bottle to try with friends. Half of them say it is ok, some screw up their faces in disgust, and others just want to drink any free solution containing some alcohol. You then discover that the supermarket can only provide half of the required amount of the stuff.
Back online.
Relying on Internet reviews of bottles of wine is a bit of a lottery. The rise of 'shilling' is partly to blame. Don't panic, the 'economic downturn' (we are apparently past the crunchy bit now) is not resurrecting old money, despite the fact we cannot even make our new money properly (the current faulty 20p coins with no dates). To shill is to pretend to be a genuine customer, but really be in the back pocket of the seller. It is hard to trust wine reviews, unless you can be sure of the authenticity due to a little research around the reviewer. There is no eBay style review of reviewers. No centralised aggregate trustworthiness system. Obviously there are lots of great shill free sites (try saying that after a few glasses..) and the rich tapestry of some of the established wine blogs are a very good bet (although I am bound to say that). Maybe someone should invent a shill free certified stamp or something, as much good as that will do.

So where to next....I suppose it is time to bother some of your friends again and ask for their ideas, assuming that they are not covertly working for some shady wine pyramid selling scheme.
You get some good recommendations like 'we had this wine at our wedding and it was perfect'. The problem is that they may well have been married a couple of years ago, and that wine is long gone, well certainly the vintage, maybe not the brand. They may well have driven to an obscure vineyard in the depths of France and spent £3.00 per bottle, ending up with a superb wine, a one off. You also want to be original, an Indiana Jones in the world of wine, flexing your deep Sunday supplement wine knowledge with your guests, feeling innovative and cavalier.

Off to a wine shop.

Immediately you are seduced by the smell of the wooden wine racks and the intimate feel of the place. All the prices are hand written and there is a little bio on each bottle, a touching and helpful life story. The shop keeper has a great knowledge of wine and guides you to a batch of he has been trying to shift for a long time...stop...now I am now being way too cynical. The wine shop is a great bet. You can develop a trusting relationship with the owner/manager and hopefully find a good bottle. You then go online and try to find it cheaper, which of course you do.
Poor independent wine shop.

Unfortunately you find a double bluff type shill review saying the wine is terrible. More confusion sets in.
In reality, after reading guides online to choosing cheap wine, the information seems to instantly evaporate on application. You need to put a considerable amount of work in if you are to go it alone.
Some pointers like these work for some and not others -

Try to buy wine produced from a more defined area and maybe not so popular general region (research required)

Check how old the wine is (lots of cheaper wine is designed to be drunk young)Look for unusual grape varietals and blends (for example some of the Italian varietals are excellent and good value)

Try to spot the quality cheaper New World bargains (some say it is better wine for your money than Old World wine in the budget bracket)

Make sure the bottle and label are impressive, attractive and/or intelligently understated , as visual perceptions can dramatically influence taste

Ask for a bulk discount and see where you end up (no-brainer)

Try the wine over a couple of evenings, with and without food (preferably similar food to the event).

Do a blind tasting of several possibilities with friends

and so on.....
What did I end up doing? I went for an unusual New World blend of grapes on the advice of a wine merchant I trusted that brought the price down, along with a bulk discount. I did a blind tasting with friends and it came out on top.
note - If you are worried about Champagne then read this post I wrote recently. In a nutshell cheap can be excellent. Even try Prosecco (an Italian dry sparkling wine) as an alternative.

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