Citra “Terre di Chieti” Merlot, 2004 vintage
price: $8 per 1.5 liter bottle (double sized)
suggested food pairings: grilled red meats and sausages, sharp cheeses, Caesar salad

Citra is a grocery store wine. It’s a cooperative of a dozen or so separate wineries that produces over 20 million bottles of wine per year and buys from over 4,200 grape growers in Italy’s Abruzzi region. It’s so big, and so efficiently run, that it can sell its wine for the equivalent of $4 a bottle, halfway around the world, and make a profit. And yet Abruzzi is known for no distinctive wines of quality, but rather for copious production of mediocre to low-grade fruit destined to become grape juice or cheap wine. To make matters worse, it doesn’t have a sexy name, or any cute animals or reptiles on the label.

To hell with all of the above. It tastes good. The wine has a deep ruby hue and a spiced blueberry nose. It does actually get exposed to oak aging—incredible at this price—and the fruit plays well with the hint of oak on the tongue. A roundness to the mouthfeel is both surprising and welcome, and is balanced by the spicy acid and oak that combine to give the wine inspired complexity.

At the equivalent of $4 a bottle (that’s everyday pricing, by the way), one doesn’t expect a finish—at least not an enjoyable one. Surprise again. The finish is smooth and echoes each of the best characteristics of the wine, a tribute to the deftness of their blenders.

This is a superb everyday wine, at an unbeatable value.

Craig Pierce can be reached at craig_l_pierce[at]hotmail[dot]com.