I’m a dedicated wino, so there are few things I like more than to be given a bottle of wine. I also like giving wine, since it requires more shopping for wine, which I also really like. As it is my job to go around collecting stories about wine, I almost always have one about whatever bottle I am giving, and more often than not about what I receive. Also, I am lucky to run in a circle of friends who like to entertain so, having sat at their tables many times, I have a pretty good idea of what they like to drink. I tend to do well in the exchange of wine gifts.
Still, there are times, when a bottle of wine seems like the best gift to give, but information on the people who will receive it, or on the selection of possible gifts at a given moment is scarce. Or, I am sometimes asked to recommend a gift of wine to a friend. In these cases, I rely on the admittedly vague schematics outlined below when considering a gift of wine beyond the courtesy of a hostess gift for an invitation to a casual dinner.
As a general rule, a wine gift ought to be worth at least a bit more than what its recipient usually pays for everyday wine. Or, in the absence of that knowledge, at least a bit more than what I would pay for everyday wine. But, unless the recipient is some kind of specialized collector, there is a ceiling on this too. A wine that is for sale today from a relatively recent vintage probably needs to be aged for some time. It could be a little bit more, or a little bit less, but the sweet spot for a substantive gift of wine ready to drink in these inflationary times is about $50.
After determining price, wine gifts could be divided into two broad categories, or said to rest somewhere on a spectrum of two poles: boring or weird. These terms are meant affectionately and might be more euphemistically called dependable or novel. Boring wine gifts are invariably variations on the concept of a luxury brand, which promises a minimum standard of quality for which it charges a premium. A weird wine gift makes no such promise but instead holds out the hope of discovery and access to pleasure.
There’s nothing wrong with a boring wine gift. Most regular drinkers of wine stick to the same small number of big-producing brands. You will know these brands by their prominence at the front of the store you buy wine in, or their presence on the shelves of Duty-Free stores and other high-volume retail outlets. Nearly every producer of wine in the world, no matter how prolific, has at least one flagship label, if not a line or lines of them. They will be good wines that offer pleasure in comforting ways that align with popular tastes.
Sparkling wine is always a good wine gift since most people enjoy a glass of it, however else their taste in wine goes. It’s hard to imagine anyone being disappointed to receive a bottle of Champagne (the real Champagne, which is from Champagne). In this way, Champagne is a classically boring wine gift because there is very little risk in handing over a bottle, and one pays a premium for that luxury. The thing about Champagne, though, is that they make somewhere around 300,000,000 bottles of the stuff a year. The widow and the monk get around enough that they may not make much of an impression.
One way to make Champagne a little weird is to gift a bottle of what has become known as grower Champagne. The big Champagne houses don’t grow all the grapes they use to make all of those millions of bottles. They rely mostly on contracted farmers, or growers.
In the last quarter century, an increasing number of the growers have started setting some grapes aside to make their own Champagne labels. The quality is as high as the big houses and often more interesting. Look for unfamiliar names on the bottles on the shelves of the Champagne section.
A sparkling wine gift that ought to be boring but is still weird is a bottle made in Canada. Our cool climate supplies all the acidity needed to make great sparkling wine in all of our wine regions. Established producers like Benjamin Bridge in the Gaspereau Valley of Nova Scotia, Henry of Pelham in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, and Blue Mountain in B.C.’s Okanagan, make flawless and delicious bubbles that easily compete with anything from France or anywhere else, and often for significantly less.
Sparkling or not, buying a wine gift from a domestic producer has benefits beyond economic nationalism. Unlike importers (in most cases, in most provinces), wines can be ordered directly from Canadian wineries in quantities other than a case of 12 or 6. This means the possibility of ordering one or two bottles of fancy local wine that can’t be easily picked up on the way home from work.
One exception to the case rule, when ordering wines from importers, as well as domestic producers, are large format bottles. 1.5 litre magnums of wine, holding twice as much as a regular bottle, or 3 litre double magnums of wine, are never a boring wine gift. Even if the wine itself is not particularly special, the container makes it so. And if you are lucky enough to be around when your recipient opens it up, then they are a great excuse to linger a little longer around the table.
