I’m normally the first person to say that if you like a wine, just drink it and enjoy yourself, because there is far too much snobbery around wine already and I have absolutely no interest in telling people that something they enjoy is somehow wrong. If you’ve spent a fiver on a bottle, you’re sitting in the garden with your mates and you’re having a lovely time, crack on, that is exactly what wine is supposed to be about.
But then this arrived.
Silver Bay Point, £4.50 from Morrisons via Amazon, which makes it without question the cheapest bottle of wine I have ever bought. I ordered it partly because I was curious and partly because I thought it would be funny, although once it was sitting on the kitchen counter in front of me I genuinely started wondering what £4.50 actually gets you when you remember that there is a bottle to manufacture, wine to make, transport to pay for and tax to hand over before anybody involved has made a penny.
I was excited to try it, although probably not for the reasons the producer would have wanted.
What Exactly Is Silver Bay Point?
The front of the bottle describes Silver Bay Point as a light and refreshing white wine, with a sweet, fresh grapefruit taste, and recommends serving it chilled. So far, nothing particularly strange there, until you look a little closer and notice that it is only 7% alcohol.
That immediately caught my attention because most still white wines you pick up in a supermarket are going to be somewhere around 11% to 13%, give or take, so 7% tells you straight away that we are dealing with something a bit different.
Then I looked online and found something I honestly cannot remember seeing on another bottle of wine, because they actually recommend serving this over ice.
Now, I’m not one of those people who is going to chase you around your kitchen because you dropped an ice cube into your glass, drink it however you like, but when the people who make the wine are actively suggesting that you dilute it and chill it as much as possible, my confidence does start to wobble slightly.
Why Is It Only 7% Alcohol?
The lower alcohol gives us a clue about the style they are going for, because one way of making a sweeter wine is to stop fermentation before all of the grape sugar has been converted into alcohol. That leaves more residual sugar behind, which gives you a sweeter drink and keeps the alcohol level down.
There is a big market for that style because lots of people enjoy sweeter wine, especially when they are just getting into drinking it, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with sweetness in itself. Some of the greatest wines in the world are sweet, so this is not me saying that sugar automatically equals bad wine.
What I wanted to find out was whether there was enough acidity and actual wine character underneath the sweetness to keep everything balanced, because that is where cheap sweet wine can sometimes fall apart.
The label was not giving me many clues either. There was no grape variety listed and no particular vineyard or wine region to talk about, instead it simply said that it was British wine produced from imported grape juice, which is not exactly the sort of sentence that gets a wine geek rushing for the corkscrew.
Still, £4.50, let’s give it a chance.
What Does a £4.50 Wine Actually Smell Like?
I opened it, poured a glass and gave it a smell, and this was the moment where things started going downhill fairly quickly.
There really was not much aroma coming out of the glass, which in itself would not have bothered me too much at this price, because I was not expecting layers of beautifully developed fruit or some incredible complexity. What worried me was the little bit I could smell, because there was something oddly synthetic and unpleasant about it.
In the video I said it reminded me of a toilet brush, which sounds ridiculous written down, but I promise you that was genuinely where my brain went. It was not that the wine had some huge offensive smell blasting out of the glass, it was more that the faint aroma it did have simply was not making me want to drink it.
At this point I was still trying to be fair, because smell is only half the story and plenty of wines become much more enjoyable once you actually taste them.
Unfortunately, that did not happen.
So What Does Silver Bay Point Taste Like?
My first reaction was that I was not entirely convinced I was drinking wine, because the whole thing felt much closer to sweet alcoholic grape juice than the sort of white wine most people would recognise.
There was sweetness, there was very little structure behind it and I struggled to find much fruit character beyond that simple grape-juice feeling. I was not sitting there wishing it had more oak or wondering whether it needed another year in the bottle, because we were nowhere near that sort of conversation, I was just trying to find something in the glass that made me want another sip.
That is an important distinction, because cheap wine does not need to be complicated to be good. There are loads of affordable bottles that are simple, fresh and genuinely enjoyable, and I recommend them all the time. If an £8 bottle gives you a nice bit of fruit, enough freshness and makes you want another glass, fantastic, job done.
This did not do that for me.
There was only one thing left to try, because the people who make it specifically recommend serving it over ice, so off I went to the freezer.
Does It Get Better Over Ice?
I dropped some ice into the glass and hoped that getting it colder and adding a little dilution might somehow rescue it.
It did make it colder, I’ll give it that.
The problem is that chilling a wine heavily does not magically give it flavour or balance, it mainly suppresses what is already there, which can sometimes be useful if what is already there is not particularly enjoyable. In this case the ice made the drink slightly easier to get through, but that is not really the compliment we are looking for.
Normally I spend a lot of time encouraging people not to worry about wine rules. Put your red in the fridge for a little while if you want to, drink rosé in December, open the expensive bottle on a Wednesday if you fancy it, because there is no point owning wine you are frightened to enjoy.
I am also very reluctant to tell anyone that a bottle they like is objectively terrible, because taste is personal and if somebody genuinely enjoys Silver Bay Point then I am not going to turn up at their house and confiscate it.
But you did ask for my opinion.
Is the Cheapest Bottle of Wine Always Bad?
Absolutely not, and I think that is really important here because the lesson from this bottle should not be that you have to spend £20 every time you want something decent.
You don’t.
There are good inexpensive wines out there and one of the things I enjoy most is finding them, because a bottle that costs very little but still tastes genuinely good is far more useful to most people than some magnificent £100 wine they are never going to buy.
The problem at £4.50 is simply how little room there is in the price for the actual wine. Once duty, VAT and all the other costs involved in getting that bottle onto the shelf have been accounted for, you have to wonder how much money is genuinely left for what you are drinking.
That does not mean every £4.50 bottle has to be horrible, but it does mean the producer is working with some fairly brutal economics, and in this case I think you can taste the compromise.
If your budget allows you to move even a few pounds further up the shelf, I think you start opening the door to much better options.
Verdict
I went into this wanting a bit of fun and I genuinely hoped Silver Bay Point might surprise me. There would have been something brilliant about opening the cheapest bottle I could find, taking a sip and discovering that it was actually perfectly decent.
Sadly, that is not what happened.
For me, this is the first bottle I have reviewed where I would genuinely say save your £4.50 and put it towards something else. It lacked the freshness and balance I want even from a very simple wine, and adding ice did not really change my mind.
If you already drink it and enjoy it, please carry on, because I mean what I always say about drinking what you like. I am not here to make anyone feel embarrassed about the bottle in their fridge.
If you are standing in Morrisons wondering whether to buy it because £4.50 looks like an absolute bargain, though, I would probably keep walking.
There are bargains in wine, but for me, this is not one of them.
Watch Me Try the Cheapest Wine I Could Find
If you want to see the moment I actually taste Silver Bay Point, including the point where I decide that putting ice in it might be our only remaining hope, you can watch the full video below. I bought it because I wanted to know what £4.50 could possibly get you in a bottle of wine, and the answer turned out to be considerably more entertaining than I expected.
