Why Malbec is a good buy on a wine list

Credit crunch drinking isn't just a question of snapping up good value bottles to drink at home. You need to be able to fillet a wine list for bargains and by and large those are the wines you - or the winedrinking public in general - don't know so well.

Take Malbec, for example. Not a hugely familiar grape variety just as Argentina, from which most of it comes these days, is a less well-known wine producing country. Result? Malbecs tend to be fairly priced on most wine lists.

I've just enjoyed a very nicely balanced one at a local restaurant The Clifton Sausage - an unlikely venue, you might think to drink anything half way decent but they have a perfectly respectable list of wines by the glass. The wine was called Polo Amateur and comes from a winery called La Chamiza. It was selling at the restaurant for a well-priced £18 a bottle but you should be able to find it for around £5.95 from independent wine shops according to importer worldwideagencies.com. Though inexplicably everywine.co.uk is selling it for roughly twice that at £139.24 a case.