The Insider Tip For Choosing The Best Wine At Trader Joe's

For those who enjoy an alcoholic drink — especially alongside a meal — it's hard to beat the allure of wine. The booze comes in a wondrous number of varieties, delectably mingles with food flavors, and doesn't necessarily break the bank. However, wine's expansive complexity can also be a source of intimidation. Staring at a retailer's shelf and wondering which is the ideal bottle to select can feel downright overwhelming.

Thankfully, modern stores are here to help ease the process, and few offer better affordable options than Trader Joe's. Wine sales have been a fundamental part of the business for decades, with innovative market strategies bringing some great offerings at low costs. The beloved two-buck chuck made by Charles Shaw wines is perhaps the best-known example, but it's just the tip of the retailer's iceberg.

With an insider tip in mind, selecting the best wine at Trader Joe's can actually be surprisingly easy to navigate. That tip is this: Get to the good stuff by heading straight to the stacks, which are the boxes of wines arranged outside the shelves. These aren't discounts or surpluses, but quite the opposite; they're the store's recommendations. As some of the highest turnover bottles, they're certainly a worthwhile purchase.

Depending on the store location, these wine displays may be arranged a little differently. However they're all meant to catch the eye. There will likely be a brief written description on a sign to highlight the wine's signature flavors. And for an extra touch, there's usually accreditation to a specific employee who has tasted that wine and liked it, with a photograph of that person. These marketing decisions and arrangements make these vino bottles feel like a personal recommendation — which, essentially is what they are. This is why they're the best; they come tried and tested.

Additionally, these wines are often the most affordable, with bottles under $10 each, priced lower than the well-ranked Trader Joe's reserve wine. The low costs are part of an innovative wine-distribution scheme that Trader Joe's pioneered. The store devised newfound mechanics of wine importation and distribution to get costs especially low, in order to attract consumers in the door. Yet they also spent a lot of time researching wine, to buy in low-cost wines that still taste good. And their wine roster constantly changes, too, meaning what's available at the stacks rotates regularly. Throw in other ever-changing Trader Joe's limited seasonal items for an accompanying snack, and the grocery store becomes the ideal stop for sampling new — and yet recommended — items.