UK Supermarket Sainsbury has halved its price for JEKEL Cabernet 2002 (and Chardonnay 2002) from 9.99 GBP to 4.99 GBP including all taxes - thats about 9 USD at current exchange rates.

Jekel is a name I've heard of but I'm so out of date with US wines I'd like to hear from the experts. Essential buy or uh huh?

I'm having trouble even finding reviews of that, and I haven't tried it myself. Why not buy one bottle and see

I managed to get one - the very last one in a huge store, and that was only because someone had put it among the white wines.

Label says 'Central Coast' It was very quaffable, very fruity full bodied, pleasant, slightly sweet. Back label said it had had extensive oak agingbut I didn't notice any oakiness

It is great. I have a glass in front of me now. At £4.99 it whups anything from Australia on Sainsbury's shelves

It's absolutely revolting. A friend bought a bottle over and we opened it after a 2002 Bourgogne (Burgundy) and after a sip I forced him to pour it away.

Drinking it is like biting into a kitchen work surface. It has a plastic artifical taste that is like melamine formaldehyde. I suspect this is because they have added flavourings.

The label is very ambiguous and tries to give the impression that the wine was aged in oak barrels, but this is a large industrially manufactured wine that I'm pretty sure would have been produced very quickly in lage aluminium vats with oak chippings added for flavour.

It is a perfect example of a new world wine-maker corner-cutting to reduce costs and producing a wine that is not even fit to clean the sewers of Bordeaux or Dijon (the prefecture of Bourgogne).

Do yourself a favour, read up about French wine and don't ever contemplate anything from the new world again, unless you go there and visit the small independent vineyards who employ traditional winemaking techniques. All the new world wines we get imported to England are simply c#@!

Asking about this wine is like asking somebody to recommend a good McDonalds to eat in. The way New world wine-producers aggresively market their inferior products is just the same.

For example there are 3 companies that bring Australian wine to England, one of whom is Fosters (the same company that makes the dreadful lager). It all tastes the same, it's industrially produced which really detracts from the quality and the argument that it's always of a similar standard and you know what you're getting is ridiculous as you know you're getting the worst wine on the market.

I agree it is all of the same standard as it is all exactly the same. They use the same grapes, the same production techniques etc.

All the new world wines we get imported to England are simply c#@!

i'm unfortunately one of those people who only likes table wine (vin-de table). the irony being that my english father will put his nose into anyone's glass insisting that it's ok because he's 'french', and my actually french mother has kindly passed on her taste for C#@! wine to me!

which brings me swiftly to the wonders of californian wine! who'd have thought?!?!?! i know i wouldn't... is it tacky of me to like white zinfandel????

I'm a strong believer of there being a place for every wine. Yes, white zinfandel is super sweet and not very powerful. But if you're having say a light salad with raisins and pine nuts, sometimes a nice sweet light wine goes well with it.

Most Americans are raised on a sugar high, with tons of HiC, fruit juice and soda being pumped into our system from the moment we can open our eyes. It's not very healthy for us, but it's the way it is. So it's not a surprise that many people start in wine with white zinfandel. I do have to say that other wines offer a wide range of flavor combinations, so while drinking white zin is fine, it's also good to try to expand your horizons from there as you go

Oh, come now! I have been known to use hyperbole myself, but I think you go too far.

I understand your dislike of large production wineries, but there is a place for them. Its not practical for "small independent vineyards who employ traditional winemaking techniques" to produce the amount of wine that is required to satisfy the worlds demand. There is no reason for wine made in large quantities to be worse than that from a small winery.

To blast all new world wine shows you have just not tried enough.

Yup and also small wineries tend to need to charge a lot to cover their costs. Large wineries can charge less because they do things in bulk. So for those on a budget, the larger wineries give them a reasonably good product for not a lot of money ...

it's true that that larger wineries can make just as good wine as the smaller, but i also agree that english wine is 'c:@p'(!) certainly the wine i've experienced has been...
the beauty of living where i do is that it's so easy to nip over to the caves in boulogne and stock up on good wine.
if ever you find yourself in cahors, it's worth going straight to the mill and buying the wine before it's been oaked. without the tanin, cahors is a delicious wine (for we who like our wines light!)