The Under $20 A Bottle Wine Thread:

I like my Chards buttery, toasty and smooth but I have had some good crisp, dry ones too. Too much oak seems to get in the way of the flavor of a lot of wines to me. I wish I knew what made a wine taste the way I like it when I find one and then be able to reliably translate that to other wines.
They seem so hit and miss to me. Label, year, region, winemaker, nothing seems to be a total indicator of what you are going to get.
What really pisses me off is when one year a particular wine is great and the next year it is a failure but the winery tries to pass it off for the same price anyway. I won't name names but this tells me something about the winery. I know one winery that will open the bottles and reblend this kind of stuff into a cheap table wine if it doesn't sell.