Follow these tips for buying wine in Paris. Photo: DesignWallah Few beverages seem as intimidating as wine. Images of blind tastings, snobbish conversations about vintages, and hefty price tags immediately come to mind. Coming to Paris, wine drinkers are like kids in a candy store. Affordable and delicious wine flows freely, but travelers can easily be duped. Whether you’re looking for some vin rouge to go with your dinner or you want a bottle for a friendly picnic, here are some tips to keep in mind for picking an affordable wine. Higher prices and pretty labels are not indicative of how much you will like a wine. Bottles at restaurants can cost €20, €40, €60 and beyond. While the wine will probably be good, less discerning pallets can opt for the much cheaper and equally tasty carafe or pichet of wine. This is a house wine that is served in a small pitcher or glass bottle that comes with none of the frills of a Saint-Emillon or Chateauneuf du Pape, but it will still be a tasty accompaniment to most French meals.

Don’t feel goofy asking for a pichet at lunch or dinner, because even the locals will order up some house red, white, or rosé on a typical evening. When purchasing a bottle of wine at the grocery store or wine store, even Cheapos have a limit. Any bottle under €3 is rarely something that you’d want to drink, more often reserved for cooking or wild student parties. Stick to the €5-10 range to ensure that the wine won’t make you wince. Look for the AOC, or appellation d’origine contrôlée on any bottle you purchase. This indicates that the wine is a credible Bordeaux, Burgundy, or whatever other region (origine) it may claim. Without the AOC, there is no way to know if the wine was made by a professional or from some guy down the street in his bathtub. Still, if you go to a wine bistrot like Le Verré Volé, many of their wines don’t have a AOC. However, you can be sure that the specialists in the store have visited the vineyards and know exactly where that wine is coming from.

Box is OK, but plastic jugs might be pushing it. Box wine is not quite trendy, but is accepted with wine stores like Nicolas offering up affordable varieties. The liter-sized plastic jugs at the supermarkets, however, are not to be trusted. Take a tip from someone who may or may not have been there – it’s not worth testing unless you want your wine to double as a paint-remover. If you taste a wine and it doesn’t suit your tastes, hopefully you didn’t buy a whole bottle of it at a restaurant. That said, if a wine tastes particularly offensive, with smells and tastes that seem unfit for any mouth, it may be corked, which means the wine has been spoiled in the bottling or aging process. While rare, receiving a corked glass or bottle of wine can happen, and if you are really unable to drink the wine, ask your bartender or server what they think and they will usually be honest with you. With aisles devoted to all sorts of regional French wines, Parisian supermarkets like Monoprix and Franprix are acceptable places to buy a bottle for dinner or a picnic.

If you want to ask questions or are looking for something specific, however, head to a wine shop, or caviste. Nicolas or Le Repaire de Bacchus are two such chains found all over the city. Additionally, there are countless independent wine shops and bistros that will be happy to help you find what you’re seeking.best value wine guide 2015 Your wine questions or advice?box of wine how many bottles What other questions do you have about wine in France? best port wine for £30Have some advice to share with our readers? best white organic wineJoin the conversation in our comments section!best wine lunch nyc

Also in our guide: Heading to Paris soon and looking for advice on great affordable sleeps? Our editors have hunted down the best hotel deals, all visited, inspected and reviewed by EuroCheapo. Read more in our Paris guide.port wine kits reviews Note: This post was updated on September 30, 2015 with new links, photos and information.Wine is something I don't know a whole lot about; I just know I really like drinking it! I won't waste your time trying to educate you about wine itself (there are much better websites and books for that), but what I can do is give you some advice for buying a good bottle during your stay in Paris. There are three main places to buy wine in France: the supermarket, the wine store, and little corner markets, called epiceries or alimentations generales. Let's start with the supermarket. Every supermarket in Paris has a wine section; in some stores it's huge! This is the cheapest place to get wine, and there's usually a range from terrible, dirt cheap stuff (around 2 euros), all the way up to the really good, very expensive stuff (20+ euros).

I'm not a rich guy by any means, and my rule of thumb is that generally anything over 5 euros is usually good, sometimes great. I usually shoot for something in the 5 to 8 euro range, and I'm rarely disappointed. A little info for comparison: Back in my life in the States, I found that I had to spend at least 15 bucks for a decent bottle of wine. My method was basically to try to find a good bottle between $12 and $17. So it was a bit of a challenge to let myself start buying 5-euro wine in Paris, but as soon as I gave it a shot I realized with much delight that it's possible, easy really, to get a really good bottle in France without spending an arm and a leg. I chalk this up to what I see as a sort of philosophy in France that good wine, like good bread, is a basic human right. Anyway, then there's option two, the wine store! You'll see these all over Paris; you can't miss them with their huge front windows full of beautiful bottles. While it's possible to find good deals in these stores, they are generally more expensive than the supermarket wine department.

However, this comes with two great benefits: One, I've never had a bad bottle of wine from one of these stores, because the owners are people who really care about wine and seek out the best products to offer in their stores. The other great advantage of the wine store is that the owner and/or staff will be able to give you fantastic advice on a good bottle to buy, based on your tastes, your price range, what you're having for dinner, etc. If you're lucky enough to find an employee who speaks your language, they'll be extremely happy to help you find the perfect bottle; even if they don't speak much English they'll probably be able to give you some very useful basic advice. I recommend this experience if you can afford to do it at least once; it's worth paying a bit more to know you're getting a bottle that an expert has taken real pride in helping choose for you. Then there's option number three, the small corner market, usually called l'epicerie ("spice store," a very old-fashioned term that's stuck around), or l'alimentation generale (general food store).

[Side note: French peole commonly refer to this kind of store as "l'Arabe" — literally "the Arab" — because they are often run by Arab people. This is very old-fashioned and strikes my liberal bleeding heart as clearly racist, but it's a common, accepted name you'll hear most French people use for these stores. I urge you not to get in the habit of using this term yourself.] These small family-run stores carry a little bit of everything; groceries, snacks, toiletries, wine, etc. It's important to know that these stores are generally much more expensive than larger supermarkets; the exact same item, same brand and everything, can literally cost twice as much in these smaller markets. The one big advantage is that they're open late! You'll probably learn quickly during your stay in France that a lot of businesses close very early, and a lot of things are closed on Sundays and/or Mondays. It can be kind of unbelievable if you're coming from America, the land of convenience — even in a large, modern, cosmopolitan city like Paris, lots of big supermarkets close as early as 7pm!

I've been here for years and I'm still shocked by this sometimes. So anyway, there are tons of small corner markets all over Paris, and they're almost all open seven days a week, and most of them stay open 'til around 1 or 2am every night. It's wonderful to have this option when it's getting late and you want a bottle of wine (or a Coke, or a snack, or whatever), so long as you realize you're going to get gouged on the price, and the wine selection will probably be somewhat small and maybe not of the best quality. But the epicerie has saved countless evenings for Parisians and tourists alike; sometimes it's late and you just need a bottle of wine, by any means necessary. I should note, I've often been happily surprised at the quality of a 6-euro bottle I've picked up from l'epicerie (which would probably be a 3-euro bottle at the supermarket), so it's definitely possible to get lucky. Now, something completely unrelated to France and French wines: A secret method that I use, which is really really stupid, is choosing a bottle partially based on the label design.

Since I'm a graphic designer, I look for a few bottles that are in my price range, and then buy the one that has the coolest or classiest label design. Now, this is definitely a silly method, but think about it: superior label design tells me that the company was willing to spend good money on packaging, essentially the face of the wine, and to me this represents a dedication to overall quality and a confidence in their product. Anyway, amazingly, it works! I've sometimes performed an experiment where I've chosen two bottles at the same price, one with great graphic design and one that's pretty hideous, bought both, and found out that the better-designed bottle tasted better every time! Is it all my head? Do I get to enjoy wine that tastes great? So why question it? Anyway, this method is so silly I'm already pretty embarrassed to have written about it. But give it a try if you're curious and think you have a good eye! Anyway, regardless of where you buy your wine, the vast majority of bottles you see will be French, and of course while you're in Paris you should take advantage of French wines without the import fees we pay in the US.