In Defense of Grocery Store Wines

• By WineBottleMag
• September 11, 2025
• Defense Grocery Store Wines
• With 0 comments

For many Americans, purchasing a bottle of wine doesn’t happen at a boutique shop or winery tasting room. Instead, value-minded drinkers place low-cost bottles into their grocery store shopping carts next to dish soap, tofu, or popcorn. Yet these supermarket-brand bottles, which studies have shown can account for over 50% of off-premise wine purchases in the U.S., often play second (or third) fiddle to those from legacy estates in typical wine industry coverage. Why is that?

In this episode of the Wine Enthusiast Podcast, we sit down with WE Writer-at-Large Emily Saladino, who reviews wines from Croatia, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, and Lebanon, to discuss her recent deep-dive into Trader Joe’s wines. From effervescent Vinho Verde to crowd-pleasing Bandol rosé, we explore the hidden gems of value that lie along TJ’s shelves and discuss what the success of grocery store wines tells us about how people really drink.

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The Highlights

On the best Trader Joe’s wines

Emily Saladino: “It was interesting to me—I was pleasantly surprised by the caliber of the French rosé that I tasted. It was a Bandol rosé, and the reason why I say ‘surprising’ is that that’s a great region for rosé. I love a rosé, but because rosé is super popular, anyone, not just a grocery store or chain, but anyone can kind of get away with putting some pretty mid wine in a bottle. If it’s pink, it’ll sell because people love rosé.

So I was really impressed by that bottle because you can kind of get away with worse, and it’ll still move. And that was a wine that, while I wouldn’t say it was the most complex, contemplative wine I’ve ever tasted, I would love to serve that with my friends—maybe if someone has a patio, listening to Tyler, the Creator with, like, a bowl of popcorn between us—it’s just a very social, fun wine.”

On why supermarket wines are so popular

ES: “It’s really important to me personally, when we talk about wines, to talk about accessibility. There’s so much within supermarket wines that you can say ‘is good’ or ‘is bad’ for wine. At the end of the day, people are there buying them, and so you want to be where your customers are. To me, what that evidences—the fact that these are popular wines, that these are popular departments of a store—it shows that people want to buy wine and they want to buy it in a non-ceremonious way. They don’t want it to be a special occasion beverage.

You know, we do a lot of—I was going to say ‘pearl clutching,’ but perhaps it’s a mean way to say it—finger pointing. We do a lot of finger pointing. There’s all this generational warfare, like ‘Millennials do this’ and ‘Gen Z does that.’ And I think rather than getting mired in generational differences, I think what’s interesting is just the fact that there’s all sorts of people who are eager to pick up wine when they’re picking up their cleaning supplies and their tofu and whatever else.

There’s all sorts of people who want to taste wine every day. They don’t want it to be something that they invest in only for a special occasion or with a ton of ceremony. That, to me, is a really cool market insight. As someone who cares about wine, who’s excited to share wine with other people, there’s no way I can look down my nose at shopping for wine anywhere.”

On whether the wine industry takes supermarket bottles seriously enough

ES: “I don’t know if I’m going to say we do or don’t take them seriously enough, but I think that it behooves us to take them seriously.… Whether we are people who have made our careers in wine or we’re people who have made our careers doing something else and just want a bottle to drink on a weekday at home between, you know, doing the laundry and getting their kids’ lunches packed, just people who are trying to make their lives work and also enjoy a glass of wine at home—I think it benefits all of us to just look for ways to share wine.

And so if that means investing time and attention as wine professionals in who’s buying wine at supermarkets? Okay, great. Let’s dig into that. And if that means… if you’re that casual weekday shopper, and then you kind of fall for wine and start thinking, ‘Oh, this is super interesting, I bought this Cali red blend that I really enjoyed and now I’m going to try a different one,’ or, ‘My gosh! My favorite Cali red blend is no longer stocked at Trader Joe’s. I’ll have to try something else,’ that’s really wonderful. Like, I think that’s how you get started getting bit by the wine bug. I don’t come from a wine background. I feel so fortunate that I wound up working in this field. There’s so many ways to get into wine. Isn’t it cool if you get into wine, just doing your weekday grocery shopping?”

On what to look for when choosing a low-cost grocery store wine

ES: “I think the first thing I would do is look for geographic specificity. That is your ace in the hole. A wine that says ‘made in France’ versus a wine that says ‘made in Vouvray’—it just promises different things. And so, Vouvray is part of the Loire Valley, so if I see that it says this super specific appellation within the Loire Valley, that means all of those grapes came from one geo-specific place. It doesn’t mean they all came from the same vineyard, but at least it gives me a sense of where they’ve been sourced from. If it says it’s from France, they could have been grown anywhere in France under any conditions with radically different farming practices at radically different wineries. And so there’s just less of a, how shall I say this… there’s less likelihood that it’ll turn out great because you’re using really disparate products to make it. Or you could be using disparate products. The variables are greater the bigger your geographic designation is. So that’s the first thing I would look for is just super specific geography.

And it’s okay if you’re like, ‘I don’t know where Vouvray is.’ Like, we don’t know where every place in the world is, but… the more specific, the better. That’s something I found just across tasting and that I kind of find when shopping for wines at supermarkets in general.

The other thing I would say is ‘keep an open mind.’ You know, I tend to drink very high-acid dry wines. That’s just my personal preference. And one of my favorites that I tasted for this particular piece was an off-dry white. So just keep an open mind, you might end up finding something that you are super excited by. And you only spent $10 dollars on it, so there you go. Now you have a whole new fun style/region/variety to dig into.

So I think those would be my main things. They sound a bit opposed, I think, but trust me, it makes sense. Look for geographic specificity, but also keep your mind wide open.”

The Guest

Emily Saladino is a writer, editor, and recipe developer based in New York. Previously the digital managing editor of Wine Enthusiast, she is a writer at large for the publication and reviews wines from Croatia, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, and Lebanon. She also writes a monthly wine column for The Washington Post and is a contributing editor at Imbibe magazine. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Food and Wine, Bloomberg Businessweek, BBC, New York magazine, Food Network, and many others. A former bartender and line cook, she has a poorly behaved cattle dog named Arby.

More About the Podcast

The Wine Enthusiast podcast is your serving of drinks culture and the people who drive it. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Spotify and anywhere else you listen to your favorite shows. Visit the podcast homepage for more episodes and transcripts. 

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Episode Transcript

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting.

Jake Abrams  00:23

Welcome to the Wine Enthusiast podcast. Your serving of drinks culture and the people who drive it. I’m Jake Abrams, Assistant editor at Wine Enthusiast. Today we’re talking to writer at large, Emily Saladino, who reviews wines from Croatia, Greece, Georgia, Hungary and Lebanon for Wine Enthusiast. In a recent article for The Washington Post, Emily tasted and reviewed nine Trader Joe’s wines that offer quality and balance without breaking the bank. As other grocery store wine brands like Costco and Aldi boom in popularity, it’s important to realize that for a lot of people, this is where most wine shopping actually occurs. Let’s dig into how Emily went about tasting these wines, what surprised her, and what this all says about how Americans drink today. Okay, Emily, thanks for joining. So let’s dive into the piece that you wrote for The Washington Post. Could you walk us through that briefly?

Emily Saladino  01:27

Sure, sure. I wrote an article for The Washington Post that’s basically a user’s guide to shopping for wine at Trader Joe’s. It’s a grocery store that many of us know and love because it tends to have fairly low prices and a lot of private label products, products that are only sold at Trader Joe’s. So the piece goes into why there are certain wines that you’ll only see at Trader Joe’s, and then how to navigate a section that can be challenging, whether you’re super knowledgeable about wine or not. And so then at the end, there’s a list of bottles after a pretty comprehensive I’d like to think tasting of Trader Joe’s wine, a couple that I recommend because I tasted them and would happily serve them in my own home to my own guests.

Jake Abrams  02:15

So how did you settle on those bottles at Trader Joe’s?

Emily Saladino  02:19

I purchased 23 bottles, and I believe the piece has nine recommendation, so it’s a pretty good percentage, right?  For sure. Yeah, that’s not bad. And so when I was shopping in Trader Joe’s for these wines to taste, I tried to get a variety so things that were super brute, dry, things that were off, dry things, that are sweet, things that are red, that are white, that are rose, that are orange, that are sparkling, that are still just to get a diversity of options, to see what the best we could find in all categories were, and then I tasted in a manner quite Similar to how we taste at Wine Enthusiast, except that, in this case, it wasn’t blind, because I had been the one buying these bottles. I knew, I knew each time what I was doing. So in that sense, it’s different, but I used a lot of the same criteria that we use to analyze wines when we’re tasting them at Wine Enthusiast, in terms of structure, body, tipicity, balance. And then for this article, because it was particularly geared at shopping on a budget, I also looked at value for money, which is, again, a deviation at enthusiast, we judge blind, so I wouldn’t know if it’s value for money. So this was because this is a value focused,

Jake Abrams  03:36

It’s important to cover all those sorts of ranges. So  as a fellow New Yorker, I’m sure it hit you and it, it hit me and all of us hard when the the Trader Joe’s wine shop in Union Square closed a few years back, it was the only one, and it, they have since not replaced it. So where did you go? Where was the Trader Joe’s that you went that was closest to you?

Emily Saladino  04:00

Oh, Jake, thank you for asking. it was it was an odyssey, yes, because here in New York, we no longer have Trader Joe’s anywhere in state. I got in a car and I drove myself to Westwood, New Jersey. It’s about an hour from where I live, and then in like a fun twist that’s perhaps only relevant to me, the day that I went, they happened to be having a power outage, so I had to drive another hour and change down to Princeton, New Jersey, a town I’d never been to before. So I actually, I drove to kind of, I don’t know if it’s central or Southern New Jersey, but I drove a distance to get myself down to Trader Joe’s, because I just know that there’s a real your groundswell enthusiasm around not just TJs, but a lot of grocery store wines. Like, I would actually say the cult of Costco wines, the cult of Aldi wines. Like, there’s just a lot of really loyal shoppers to these supermarkets and to their wines in particular. And so I was eager to explore it. worth the miles, worth the gas mileage.

Jake Abrams  05:00

That’s quite a journey. To be clear, there are no Trader Joe’s wine shops in New York State anymore. There’s a Trader Joe’s in most neighborhoods, but they are just not allowed, they need to have a separate license to sell wine and liquor. So it’s made things very difficult for those of us who love the two Buck Chuck.

Emily Saladino  05:18

It does. It does. It’s a shame, you know, I think it’s it’s interesting, because there’s such a appetite, no pun intended, in New York, New York City. But even, just like all of the state for these bottles, it’s been interesting the not just these particular bottles, but for the chance to buy wine under $15 at a grocery store. A lot of the response I’ve gotten to this piece has been a) people telling me that their favorite TJs wine wasn’t in it, or B) this, there’s a lot of folks out there who just they love their pick, but B also a lot of folks who are saying, oh my gosh, I miss my local TJs wine shop. And so I think that it’s interesting that there is, there is this real appetite and eagerness to buy wine at the grocery store, you know, just make it part of your everyday life. Totally.

Jake Abrams  06:06

Were there any standouts in that lineup?

Emily Saladino  06:09

There were, it was interesting to me. I was pleasantly surprised by the caliber of the French rose that I tasted. It was a Bandol Rose. And the reason I say surprising is that that’s a great region for Rose. I love a rose a but because Rose is super popular anyone, not just a grocery store or chain, but anyone, you can kind of get away with putting some pretty mid wine in a bottle, if it’s pink and it’ll sell, because people love rose, yeah. So I was, I was really impressed by that bottle because, because you can kind of get away with worse men, it’ll still move. And that was a wine that, while I wouldn’t say it was the most complex, contemplative wine I’ve ever tasted. I would love to serve that like with my friends, maybe on if someone has a patio, like listening to Tyler, The Creator, with, like, a bowl of popcorn between us, like, it just very social fun wine

Jake Abrams  07:04

setting the scene. Yeah, I’m sure Tyler, The Creator, would love to to be featured in that with the Bandol. So beyond that, were there any patterns that in those nine wines that you saw pop out? I mean, bold flavors? Was there a lot of room for nuance in wines that don’t you know cost that much?

Emily Saladino  07:26

A great question. I definitely saw quality in what I would call like lesser sung varieties, less prevalent varieties in the United States. So there was more quality across the board, in my experience, among sort of like the Gruner vet learners versus the Pinot grigios. Because again, that wasn’t that wasn’t necessarily that there were no no good Pinot grigios, but it was just something that I noticed that some of these kind of lesser sung in the United States varieties tended to be pretty high quality. And I think that’s a really cool thing. I think it means that if you’re just trying to buy a bottle of wine at the same time you’re buying, like, dish soap and a box of tofu, like, you can still also pick up a decent, you know, a cool bottle and, like, you don’t have to be well versed in Austrian varieties to do so. I think that’s really cool. The other kind of, like, broad trend I saw, which perhaps I’m less, like, delighted by, but is perfectly reasonable, is a lot of the lines that were marketed as dry, I found to have a decent amount of Rs. So to have, like, a, to me, percept perception of residual sugar, and so, yeah, that was something that. And I guess that, like, that’s not necessarily a shocker, because I guess you know, the stereotype of the American palette is we love sweets, right? And, you know, Coca Cola is our mother’s milk, whatever, yeah. So I think that perhaps that’s not like a shock. And I think many of the super popular commercial like California red blends often do to me, present as sweets. I don’t know their like makeup. I’m not I’m not here talking about their ingredients, but I have a very perceptible sweetness. And so that was something that I noticed also, is a lot of the red blends, domestic red blends, I found them to be on the sweeter end of the spectrum, even when they were dry wines, and that that sticks to a lot of things like that. Can be the style of wine making, that can be some, you know, additives. I don’t know. As I said, I don’t know. No, I wasn’t in the winery, so I’m not here saying there are additives or there aren’t. But I just thought that was an interesting pattern that perhaps speaks to like a commercial potential of these wines,

Jake Abrams  09:43

yeah, definitely, yeah.

Emily Saladino  09:45

So that I know those were like kind of two broad patterns. So I had that I saw, rather, I don’t know, that I tasted anything that I thought was, you know, the most complicated wine that I would want to, you know, invest in a climate controlled environment to cellar it like there was nothing that fit that bill for me. But, you know, everything’s relative. Perhaps for someone else, they’d be like, Nah, I’m gonna put that down for two years and open her up. Then, you know, it just we’re all, you know, we’re all,

Jake Abrams  10:13

that’s true. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s an important distinction to talk about how these wines are not 99s out of 100 necessarily. I mean, I, I have no idea that could happen. Um, but we’re talking about wines that are very, very solid for their price. And, yeah, right. You might not be selling these wines, but on a Tuesday night, you know, you’re buying dinner, you’re buying your box of dish soap and tofu, like you said, and, and you want something that you can rely on, and, and there are some great picks out there, so I think that’s the through line. But I think it’s also about accessibility to it to a wider audience. I mean, whether that’s like a little bit of Rs in there, because our palette is, is needing that, that’s part of it. And I think that it could be a really interesting way for people to explore other regions, other grapes, without necessarily having to dive in and dedicate a ton of time or money to it. I mean, if you can get a Gruner veltner for less than $12 that you think might be great, like, that’s, that’s a really awesome way to learn about it. So I think it’s just expanding what people can be, you know, drinking, and what people are comfortable with

Emily Saladino  11:32

absolutely, you know, what I think you you hit on something that’s really important, you know, to me personally, which is accessibility. There’s so much within supermarket wines that you can say is good is bad for wine. At the end of the day, people are there buying them, and so you want to be where your customers are. To me, what that evidence is that, the fact that these are popular wines, that these are popular departments of a store, it shows that people want to buy wine, and they want to buy it in a non ceremonious way. They don’t want it to be a special occasion beverage. You know, we do a lot of, I was going to say Pearl clutching, but perhaps it’s a mean way to say finger pointing. We do a lot of finger pointing. You know, there’s all this generational warfare, like millennials do this, and Gen Z does that. And I think, you know, rather than getting mired in generational differences, I think what’s interesting is just the fact that there’s all sorts of people who are eager to pick up wine when they’re picking up their cleaning supplies and their tofu and whatever else. There’s all sorts of people who want to taste wine every day. They don’t want it to be something that they invest in only for a special occasion or a ton of ceremony. That, to me, is a really cool market insight. As someone who cares about wine, who’s excited to share wine with other people, there’s no way I can look down my nose at shopping for wine anywhere,

Jake Abrams  12:54

totally I mean, we’ve seen studies that show that you know, much of off premise wine purchasing happens at grocery stores. That’s wine that you buy somewhere to drink somewhere else, so not at a restaurant, that kind of thing. What do you think that says about how people are actually engaging with wine?

Emily Saladino  13:14

I love that statistic for exactly that reason, because people are eager to engage with wine, not necessarily only because it’s a birthday or, you know, you’re someone’s getting married, you’re eager to just have wine on a Tuesday night with your dinner, with your bowl of popcorn, your tofu, whatever it is, you’re enjoying that evening. You know, I think that that’s a really encouraging stat to me, like that’s that’s exciting, that there’s over 50% of purchases off premise, like not in a bar or restaurant, are happening at the grocery store. These are folks who are just eager to drink wine day to day, make it part of their everyday life. That’s encouraging.

Jake Abrams  13:53

Yeah. I mean, So that begs the question, are we as wine industry people, taking these shoppers seriously enough?

Emily Saladino  14:02

I mean, I don’t know that I want, I don’t know if I’m gonna say we do or don’t take them seriously enough, but I think that it behooves us to take them seriously. I guess it behooves all of us to just treat one another, whether we are people who have made our careers in wine, or we’re people who have made our careers doing something else and just want a bottle to drink on a weekday at home, between, you know, doing the laundry and getting their kids lunches packed, you know, just people who are trying to just make their lives work and also enjoy a glass of wine at home. I think it, it benefits all of us to just look for ways to share wine. And so if that means investing time and attention as wine professionals in who’s buying wine at supermarket. Okay, great, let’s, let’s dig into that. And if that means, then, if you know, if you’re that casual weekday shopper, and then you kind of fall for wine, you start thinking, Oh, this is. Super interesting. And I bought this Kali red blend that I really enjoyed, and now I’m going to try a different one, or, you know, my gosh, my favorite Cali red blend, just no longer stock at Trader Joe’s. I’ll have to try something else that’s really wonderful, like, I think that’s how you you get started getting kind of bit by the wine bug, which I don’t come from a wine background. I I feel so fortunate that I wound up working in this field. There’s so many ways to get into wine. Isn’t it cool if you get into wine just doing your weekday grocery shopping?

Jake Abrams  15:29

right? Yeah. I mean, it’s a gateway. I remember a few years ago, I had a Riesling from North Carolina that was picked up at a Kroger in Kentucky, and I was just, like, thrown it was just, you know, that didn’t cost a lot, but it was so interesting. And I think that there’s a real opportunity for localized sort of shopping that might not be happening in a wine shop in New York City. I we’re not necessarily carrying Riesling from North Carolina. I mean, have you seen instances of that trend happening?

Emily Saladino  16:04

I have sadly never gotten to drink a Riesling from North Carolina. Just gonna quickly say that I’ve sadly, I sadly, yeah, one day. But here’s the thing, right? Like our climate is changing, winemaking is changing, we might listen to this episode in five years. You know, the colony that we live in on the moon. No, we might listen to this episode in five years and be like, Oh my gosh, how funny it was that we didn’t, you know, know everything there is to know about the extraordinary wine making capacities of the Carolinas. Like, there’s, there’s just so much about, you know, across the United States that is forever in flux, I should say, around the world, but also, particularly with domestic wine, like there’s so much that is forever changing, and so I’m very open to tasting anything from anywhere. It’s interesting. I tasted a Wisconsin fruit wine that I picked up at, I can’t remember what chain it was. It was like a big grocery store chain, because I was visiting Midwestern friends had like a lake house in, like, their dad’s lake house in the sort of northern Wisconsin, stunning part of the US, and I would add a grocery store, and I was like, Well, I’m interested in trying this Wisconsin made fruit wine. And so I think that’s kind of exciting. If you’re open and interested in wine, you might not like it. They’re not all winners, but, like, they’re never all winners. We’re all, you know, we all have pallets, and we all have preferences, and if you’re spending, you know, $10 on a bottle and you don’t love it, it’s a bummer. Don’t get me wrong, I hate losing $10 Of course. You know, like, all is not lost. There’s all sorts of things you can do with the wine you don’t like. That’s also something that I think is kind of great about shopping for wine at a grocery store is even if you don’t love it, if it’s really, really within your budget, you can, you know, you don’t have to even pour it down the drain. You can pour it into ice cube trays and freeze it to cook with it later. You can bake with it like the Don’t worry, you know, you’ll, you’ll live to fight another day.

Jake Abrams  17:59

Yeah, it’s less of a barrier to entry, to learn and have that experience totally I think another really interesting angle is climate change, because there are regions. I mean, the US is a relatively young wine region, if you want to call the US a wine region, comparatively to other places around the world. So I don’t know if we figured everything out yet, and I think that climate change is a really interesting, horrible, awful wrench that has been thrown in the winemaking world, but it’s going to open up new opportunities for places like Wisconsin, where you might not necessarily be growing vines. That might happen. And I think that could be a really interesting way for people to get in on the ground floor of regions like that. Is, I went to a grocery store in Wisconsin and had this local wine, and it was amazing. How did you guys not know about this? I’m going to start a vineyard here.

Emily Saladino  18:58

Right, right? Yeah, there’s, there’s so much potential. I agree. I think that wine making, wine drinking, wine culture in the US is is just comparatively so young, and that can be challenging, but that also can be huge potential.

Jake Abrams  19:12

Yeah, so for someone who’s listening with $10 in their pocket, and they’re at a grocery store, a Kroger or an Aldi or a Costco, or wherever. What should we look for in a wine?

Emily Saladino  19:26

This is, this is the million dollar $10 question. Well, you know what I mean, the million dollar question when you have to know it, I am, I think the first thing I would do is look for geographic specificity. That is the you know, you’re ace in the hole, like you a wine that says Made in France, versus a wine that says made in Vouvray. It’s just It promises different things. And so Vouvray is part of the Loire Valley. So if I see that, it says this The super specific. By appellation within the Loire Valley. That means all of those grapes came from one geo specific place. It doesn’t mean they all came from the same vineyard, but at least it gives me a sense of where they’ve been sourced from. If it says it’s from France, they could have been grown anywhere in France under any conditions, radically different farming practices, radically different wineries. And so there’s just less of a how shall I say this? The there’s less likelihood that you’ll that it’ll turn out great, because you’re using really disparate products to make it or you could be using disparate products, the sort of variables are greater, the bigger your geographic designation is. So that’s the first thing I look for, is just super specific geography. And it doesn’t, it’s okay if you’re like, I don’t know where Vouvray is. Like, we don’t know where every place in the world is, you know. But just look for something that is, you know, what smaller than a country looks like. So just like, look for the more specific, the better. That’s something I found just across tasting. And I kind of find, in general, when, when shopping for wines. The other thing I would say is, like, keep an open mind. You know, I tend to drink very, you know, high acid dry wine, just as my my personal preference, and one of my favorites that I tasted for this particular piece was a an off dry white. So, like, just keep an open mind. You might end up finding something that you are super excited by, and you you’ll you only spent ten dollars on it. So there you go. Now you have a whole new fun style, region variety to dig into. So I think those would be my main things. You know, look for the kind of thing. They sound a bit opposed, I think, but trust me, it makes sense. Look for geographic specificity, but also keep your mind wide open.

Jake Abrams  21:44

Yeah, I would say also looking by varietal might be, if you know, if you’re someone who already knows what you like, then that might be a good option. If I know I like Grenache, you know, I’ll probably, I’m more likely to like a Grenache from somewhere that I haven’t tried yet than, you know, than another varietal, possibly. you also mentioned in your article to look by importer? I think that it might be a little too inside baseball for like the beginner, but I think it’s an important distinction, like, once you get a little more comfortable with wine, to to look at those importers, and if it’s from somebody that you trust, you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a pretty good bet that you that you might like it.

Emily Saladino  22:27

I think that’s useful guidance when you’re shopping for wine anywhere in totally a tiny boutique wine shop that like is, you know, playing the owners bands record and in a huge grocery store under fluorescent lights, right? Like I think that in in both circumstances, knowing importers is so useful when you’re shopping for international wines, it’s not something everyone does, and I get it, we are we’re busy. You have a rich inner life. You aren’t spending your time flipping over bottles and reading them back, but I do think it’s super useful once you learn the names of a couple, like, you know it. it’s almost like, if you’re, you know, back in the day, if you, like, loved a certain like, well, now this is too old fashioned of I was gonna say, if you you loved a record label, but no one does that anymore.

Jake Abrams  23:18

We might be like, 10 years, 10 years away from that.

Emily Saladino  23:22

But no, you know, I think it’s, it’s a once you kind of find folks who have a similar esthetic, palette, sensibility to you, it can help guide the way you purchase. so if it’s really important to you that to drink wines that are farmed organically, if you biodynamic agriculture is important to you. You can seek out importers who specialize in those types of wineries. It’s just a it’s like a kind of shortcut to finding wines, because it’s a huge category of wine, right? Finding wines that speak to your sensibilities, to what you value when you’re shopping. You know, all of us are kind of making purchasing decisions guided by something, be it cost, be it convenience, be it ideology. And so finding importers that kind of speak to your sensibilities is just a nice way to kind of like it narrows your choices in a good way. It helps make sense of a huge, huge, category.

Jake Abrams  24:19

Totally, yeah. Well, this has been so, so fun. Thank you so much for joining you can read Emily’s full article in the Washington Post, the nine bottles from Trader Joe’s that she would serve to Tyler, The Creator, on a patio. Yeah, Emily, thank you so much for joining us.

Jake Abrams  24:40

Are you part of the Trader Joe’s fandom? Let us know at podcast@wineenthusiast.com you can subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen to your favorite shows. You can also go to wineenthusiast.com/podcast for more episodes and transcripts.nI’m Jake Abrams, thanks for listening.

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