GotSmart
"So we will be the next feature in Snooty Living!
Thanks for the laugh.
A bottle of decent wine is more than I spend to feed four people for two meals. A bottle of GOOD wine is as much as a tank of gas. A bottle of FINE wine will fill the tank three times. (I have a 35 gallon tank.)
The Napa Valley does not allow Vandwellers. Now if you have a full blown RV, that is different! 
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Beg to differ. Anyone can spend a lot and usually end up with a good bottle. (Usually.) The art is to spend just a little bit and still drink as well as the folks who spend a lot on the big names.
I'm interested enough in wine to have worked as a wine rep for a couple different distributors. I favor reds, which tend to be more expensive than whites. A bottle of "decent" red can be had at any good size store on sale for $7-$12, almost any time of the year. (To me, decent is a 90-92 point wine. That's pretty good stuff...) "Good" wines (93-94 points) are regularly found in the $12-$18 range if you just watch sales at larger stores.
Tonight I grilled burgers, made of ground chuck and spiced with (among other things) my top secret spice that no one ever thinks to use on beef. We're polishing off a superb little Argentinian Malbec - 92 points - $6.99 on sale. You may reflexively scoff, but everyone who tastes it raves.
As a dinner guest, I have brought this same wine three different times now - once with steaks, another with ribs and most recently, fondue. Every time, people have commented, written down the label info and bought more for themselves. (At the fondue dinner, I wrapped the bottles in brown paper bags, and asked everyone to guess the cost. Guesses were $20-$30!)
It's all about priorities. If you care about wine, you can budget for it and be in a position to grab a few bottles at a time whenever you see a deal.
Unless you drink every night (and I hope you don't) you can boondock and enjoy a stock of pretty dang good wines that didn't set you back much at all.
And man, for the price of a tank of gas, I can almost always come up with a 96-98 point wine that is truly magnificent. I'm talking about a stunning bottle that would sell for $300-400 at the kind of restaurant that has the clientele inclined to pay that much for wine.
For those who favor lighter wines, I have on hand a nice French Rose that was $6 just before Easter, a 92 point Pinot Grigio that was $8 or a 93 point Chardonnay that was, I think, just $10 or $11. These are all the kind of wines that would elicit an "mmmm..." of appreciation all around the table at the first sip.
It's really not that difficult.
BTW, I can scope out liquor stores on my smartphone as I pass through any good size city and reliably duplicate these results. If I make it to RTR in 2017, I may just give a class on how to do this - bargain wine hunting, as it were. Everyone would be walking home, so it could be a lot of fun...
