It's probably the one and only constant in the great, heaving flux that is the world of wine. It interests me, it interests you, and you can be damned sure your friendly local wine merchant is obsessed with it. It's the never-ending search for everyday miracles - bottles which cost not much more than £5 but which somehow taste like they're worth more. We all know they're out there somewhere, hiding shyly behind much flashier, commercially muscular cousins. Now, with finances still sickly after the Christmas blast, the need to find them is acute.
These are wines to treasure (or at least remember) when you're broke but thirsty. They're more-dash-than-cash wines to produce with a flourish alongside a simple stew; bottles to notch up the pleasure quotient of a takeaway; to take along to a friend's house some midweek evening for not much more than the price of a bunch of daffs. The snag is that, like chainstore T-shirts that look like Armani and jumble-sale evening bags with an air of Lulu Guinness, they are devilishly hard to find. You have to keep rummaging, trying things on for size, pondering, rejecting. Because a shocking amount of dross - either bland and boring or actually noxious - is still flooding into Irish wine shops. Given our indecently high excise duty and VAT, it may not be reasonable to expect thrilling bottles in the £5£7 bracket, but they should at least be drinkable. Even maybe mildly life-enhancing. Where are they, these unsung gems? Ha! That's precisely what I'd like you to tell me, since the foraging abilities of thousands of readers are sure to cover much more ground than a single sniffing scribe. Over the next few weeks, I'd love you to drop me a line and tell me about any wine bargains you've recently enjoyed. The current retail price must be under £7 (punts, not sterling) and as well as the cost I'd like to know the name of the wine, the producer, the vintage, where you bought it and (briefly) why you liked it. Obviously, I'm mainly interested in hearing about wines I haven't written about before.
I will not be idle, I promise you, as the first Irish Times Readers' Wine Competition rolls into action. I'll be busily tasting all your recommendations so that I can feature the six I like best in a future column. Everybody who nominates one of these will receive a mixed case of the winning wines as a prize. (And if it should happen that several readers choose the same wines, we'll pick the name of the prize-winning nominator out of a hat.) Twelve tasty bottles for the price of a stamp. Surely that can't be bad.
In the meantime, to get you into the right frame of mind, I'm publishing the results of my own work-in-progress on this perennial theme. Below is a round-up of recent under-£7 discoveries that seem to me to be well worth their modest price-tag. I've included more reds than whites because we're still very much in the red zone, weather-wise - in dire need of wine to warm the farthest recesses of our chilled constitutions in the way that only a robust red wine can. If you've any left over, decant into a small screwtop bottle and save for the moment when you set about making one of this week's casseroles. See Weekend 12