Costco's 15 Best Under $15 Wines You Shouldn't Skip

Big-box warehouse stores, such as Costco, come in handy for delivering high-quality, name-brand items, typically for less than you may find at a traditional grocery store, including in its wine and liquor department. The wholesaler is well-known for having one of the best wine departments, thanks to its ability to bulk-buy products and divide them among its hundreds of store locations worldwide. These selections can include over-the-top, rare wines that are sold at Costco, which, while available at high price points, are still generally less expensive than you will find in the general market.

Along with these high-end options, there are also dozens of well-priced, inexpensive, and tasty red, white, and rosé wines at Costco. These 15 sub-$15 options won't set you back an entire paycheck and are perfect for enjoying any night of the week. Each option is available at select locations nationwide, and pricing is accurate as of May 2026.

From the heart of Spain's Rioja region, Bodegas Cune showcases the approachability of tempranillo in its Rioja Reserva. The historic brand with roots dating back to 1879 has been a leader in the production of Rioja since its inception. Tempranillo is an easy wine to enjoy. It has a medium body, acidity, and tannin, with fruity flavors of blackberry, cherry, and blackcurrant with leather and tobacco notes. 

Cune highlights this in its Rioja Reserva, aged for 18 months in a combination of French and American oak, followed by a minimum of 18 months additional aging in bottle. Coming from hand-harvested fruit grown in the premium Rioja Alta sub-region, the wine, with 14% alcohol, shows the classic characteristics that define great tempranillo-based Rioja, with a soft, velvety finish revealing balanced tannin in a beautifully polished wine. Available for $14.99 at Costco, this wine is delicious when paired with classic Spanish fare, such as cheesy croquettes, albondigas, or paella.

Malbec is the signature red variety of Argentina. With a typically reliable, warm, and sunny climate, the Argentine grapes develop their phenolic character fully, while the area's high elevations, bringing cool temperatures at night, ensure a slow ripening and long growing season. 

From Finca El Alto de Ugarteche, Doña Paula El Alto Single Vineyard Malbec comes from the winery's Lujan de Cuyo, Mendoza, estate vineyard. Vines grow at approximately 3,000 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Andes mountains. The vineyard's soils are nutrient-poor, with rocky, sand and clay soils. Vines must dig deep into the earth for nutrients, extracting mineral-rich characteristics that give depth to the wine. 

The wine undergoes a long maceration, followed by fermentation and 12 months of French oak aging, lending further complexity to the wine's character. Barrel-influenced characteristics of dried leather, toasted spice, and dark chocolate mingle with the fruit's natural black plum, Morello cherry, and blackberry flavors. The finish shows a mineral-rich, earthy, herbaceous backbone. 

Doña Paula follows sustainable practices in the vineyard, delivering wines with authenticity and varietal clarity. With an average price of $11.91 at Costco, the 13.9% alcohol wine is delicious paired with beef or game. Try it with a slow-cooked, sous vide, and seared ribeye steak.

Finding a premium-quality pinot noir that shows authenticity while displaying terroir-driven characteristics for under $20 can be challenging. The difficult-to-grow variety typically commands a higher price point due to the delicate handling required to ensure the fruit remains healthy throughout the growing season. Due to inflated production costs, finding a varietally correct, 100% pinot noir for under $15 is a rarity you will want to scoop up in bulk. Costco delivers this with the Wapisa pinot noir from Patagonia, Argentina, currently available for $14.99. 

High-elevation vineyards within the southern Argentinian region offer the cool climate that the finicky pinot noir fruit requires. The winery's vineyards lie just 25 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, bringing coastal influences with cool, maritime breezes.

Hand-harvested fruit enjoys a long, cool maceration to extract the wine's eye-catching, garnet ruby color. Fermentation and aging in oak barrels for 10 months follow, lending toasty cedar and spice notes to the wine's red fruit flavors. The wine has a beautiful freshness that makes it endlessly attractive. With 13.9% alcohol content, the wine layers of wild strawberry and pomegranate harmonize together with fresh violets and roses.

Chardonnay wine's style can range from one end of the spectrum to the other. These wines can be very buttery, creamy, and heavy, displaying tropical fruit and toasted spice notes that warm you from the inside out. This is often due to the production process, including full malolactic fermentation and new oak aging. At the other end, producers can produce light, lean, mineral-driven wines from chardonnay fruit, showing bright citrus, tart apple, and crushed-stone minerality. 

Crafting its Oregon chardonnay using only stainless steel for fermentation and aging, Willamette Valley's Chehalem Winery showcases the purity and essence of the fruit. The winery ages the fermented wine on the lees, or spent yeast strains, for seven months in the tanks. The lees give roundness and texture to the crisp, citrus and orchard-fruit-filled wine, along with a touch of yeasty creaminess. 

Layers of white flowers, white peaches, and ripe pear unfold as the wine opens in the glass, leading to orchard and stone fruit flavors on the palate. With 12.5% alcohol, the wine's texture is perfect for pairing with light pasta, vegetable, or white fish dishes, such as a simple orange roughy with lemon cream sauce. The crisp, natural acidity and fruitiness of the wine will meld with the citrus in the sauce, taming its richness. The winery offers the selection for $25, but select Costco locations have the wine available at a nicely discounted price of $12.99 to $14.99

The Marchesi Incisa family has called Italy's Piedmont region home since the 1400's. This Northwestern Italian region is the home to some of the finest wines in the world, including the king and queen of Italian wine, Barolo and Barbaresco. In vineyards surrounding these two highly tannic red wines, the barbera variety thrives, producing zesty red wines with punchy fresh acidity, balanced tannin, an earthy backbone, and black fruit flavors, particularly from Piedmont's Asti sub-region.  

Marchesi Incisa Valmorena Barbera d'Asti opens with aromas of violets, cherries, and wild herbs, followed by a fruit-forward, fruity palate of dark cherries, ripe plums, and berries with an earthiness indicative of the region. The fresh acidity and medium body make it an ideal wine to pair with rich dishes, such as braised lamb shanks or herb-roasted pork chops. 

With 14.5% alcohol, each sip of the high-quality wine delivers more than expected. This is even more so considering the low $13.99 price that various Costco locations nationwide offer for the selection. A few lucky shoppers may be able to find it for as low as $8.97. 

Barbera d'Asti earned DOCG classification in 2008, the highest quality tier for wines in Italy. Meaning Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita, DOCG wines must follow strict guidelines outlined by the region in their production. These guidelines ensure the quality of the wine, highlighting its authentic character.

Winemaker Gérard Bertrand is a leader in biodynamics, organic farming, and the application of biodynamic principles in the vineyards and winery, ensuring environmental sustainability. With each wine in his portfolio, he shows that respecting the land results in terroir-driven wines that showcase the land. From Corbières within the Languedoc region of southern France, Bertrand crafts Hérésie. 

The wine is a classic southern Rhone-style blend of syrah, grenache, and mourvedre. Syrah brings structure and black fruit, grenache brings freshness with red fruits, and sun-loving mourvedre lends length, tannin, and licorice flavors. The combination delivers a 14% alcohol wine with balance, richness, and endless character that is available at Costco for as low as $14.99 at select locations. Enjoy rich dishes such as umami-laden osso buco beef shank.

From vineyards nestled along the Atlantic coast in northwestern Spain's Rias Baixas region, the white albariño grape produces wines that taste like the sea. The Galician area is known as Green Spain due to its high annual rainfall. Where some parts of Spain feel more like the desert, in Rias Baixas, the climate is more moderate, with warm days and cool evenings thanks to the ocean's maritime influence. The climate is complemented by the region's natural mineral-intense soils, laden with granite and schist, giving the wines their characteristic crushed stone, mineral-rich edge, as displayed in Terras Gauda Abadía de San Campio albariño. 

Following sustainable practices using estate-grown fruit, the winery displays the area's best attributes in its 100% albariño wine. The albariño shows white peach, mango, white flowers, and golden citrus-filled wine. It has lip-smacking acidity and mouthwatering salinity, a trademark characteristic of Rias Baixas. 

With 12.5% alcohol, the wine pairs nicely with seared scallops, linguine with clams, or a pan-seared rockfish with briny capers, accentuating the wine's saline note. The winery offers the selection for $20, but Costco's average price is $11.17. That's a considerable bargain, particularly given the wine's quality.

For lovers of Italian wine, there is perhaps no other white wine for summer than a vermentino. Drinking a glass of Italian vermentino is like sipping sunshine. The high-acid variety shows similarities to sauvignon blanc, with bright citrus fruit flavors. However, its character and quality go beyond those of many typical sauvignon blanc wines, as shown in Banfi La Pettegola vermentino.

The historic Italian producer reveals the grape's stone-fruit, wildflower, and herbal characteristics in its Tuscan selection. Banfi's grapes come from the coastal Maremma area of Tuscany, where sea breezes keep the fresh acidity bright throughout the growing season. Grapes undergo a long, temperature-controlled fermentation, helping maintain the fruit's natural acidity, while bringing forward the fruit's white peach, pear, jasmine, and soft herbal qualities. 

There is an unctuous, oily texture to the wine's palate, displaying a classic characteristic of vermentino. The taste, texture, and approachability of the 13% alcohol wine will pair well with a citrusy baked fish with orzo or a herbaceous spring vegetable and grain salad. Banfi suggests a $20 price for the wine, but Costco is offering it for an average price of $14.51.

If you are a fan of full-flavored, syrah, grenache, or zinfandel wines, you should be drinking nero d'avola. The heat-loving Sicilian grape variety, with a deep purple-black hue, produces richly colored wines that are spicy, black-fruit-forward, and concentrated. It thrives in Sicily's mineral-intense, nutrient-poor soils, where many producers dry-farm the variety, requiring the vines to dig into the earth to find food and water, giving structure and complexity to the wine. While the wines are robust, the bottle price is not. Many well-made selections cost under $15. 

Costco offers Masseria del Feudo nero d'avola for just over $10.00. The hand-harvested, organic wine opens with luscious notes of red cherries, ripe berries, and red currants, with dark chocolate, pepper, and crushed stone. Six months of aging in cement tanks helps soften the tannins, ensuring the wine has a balanced mouthfeel, maintaining its natural acidity. There is an earthy, terroir-driven rusticity that makes this wine (which has 13% alcohol) stand out from others, showing authentic Sicilian heritage in every sip.

La Crema winery delivers one of the best thirst-quenching rosé wines in terms of approachability, affordability, and overall taste with its juicy rosé. Available for an average price of $12.49 at Costco, the pinot noir-based wine is made from certified sustainable fruit from the Monterey region of California's Central Coast.

Pacific-influenced vineyards enjoy warm days, cool nights, and endless sunshine, ripening the juicy pinot noir with vibrant natural freshness. Stainless-steel fermentation at cool temperatures helps maintain freshness, revealing ripe watermelon, wild berries, and peach flavors. These unfold on the front palate in this 13.5% alcohol wine, followed by hints of wild roses and citrus cream. A touch of saline and crushed stone minerality lingers invitingly from the mid-palate through the delicate finish.

From vineyards across California, including warmer and cooler climate regions, Decoy Wines crafts its vibrant sauvignon blanc. Using fruit from a variety of areas, including Santa Barbara County, San Luis Obispo, northern Lake County, and Sonoma, ensures the wine displays a range of textures and flavors. Pacific Ocean-influenced, cooler regions help the wine maintain natural acidity, showing classic Loire-style characteristics, where warmer areas will bring fruit-forward, tropical, and citrus flavors to the forefront. 

As the wine opens, pineapple, mango, and lilikoi unfold, melding with white peach, nectarine, lemon balm, and soft herbs. The wine ferments in stainless steel, highlighting the natural freshness. Six months of aging helps to round out the edges. It does this while leaving a welcome hint of creaminess in this highly refreshing, 13.9% alcohol wine. 

It is a wine to enjoy with the flavors of summer, such as a warm peach and burrata salad or an herbaceous pesto shrimp pasta. The suggested retail price of this lively refresher from Decoy is $20. However, select Costco locations offer the wine for as low as $11.89 a bottle.

Merlot is an easy-to-enjoy red wine. The variety tends to produce plush wines with fresh, fruity characteristics, a medium body, soft tannin, and just enough acidity to make it interesting. Rodney Strong Vineyards highlights the approachability of the variety in its Sonoma County merlot. 

For the wine's current 2023 release, the harvest was later than normal due to cooler temperatures throughout the growing season, resulting in an atypical hang time for the fruit. The additional time allowed the fruit to slowly develop the phenolics, while maintaining its natural fresh acidity. The wine shows ripe layers of black plum, dark berry, and cherry. 

Aging in French oak barrels — of which 25% were new — for 18 months allowed the tannins to become fully integrated into the wine. The oak lends toasty tobacco, espresso, cedar, and warm baking spice notes to the 14.5% alcohol wine. It pairs well with grilled or braised meat, particularly lamb, such as our hazelnut-crusted lamb chops. The crust's nutty flavors will accentuate the wine's toastiness, while the wine's fruitiness will balance the meat's gaminess. Rodney Strong offers the wine for $25, making Costco's $14.99 price a steal.

Grounded Wine Company Space Age rosé shows everything there is to love about rosé wine, without taking itself too seriously. It is juicy, fresh, and fruit-forward with punchy acidity and a slight mineral edge to keep the palate light and lifted. The California-appellation rose blends 86% grenache with 13% cinsault and a touch of carignane. 

Freshness is the key quality of this easy-to-drink, coral-colored rose. Layers of ripe strawberry, guava, blood orange, and orange peel mingle together effortlessly from the front palate to the back. With a low 12% alcohol content and a reasonable $11.09 price at most Costco locations, the wine will make a refreshing addition to your summer playlist, particularly paired with fresh seafood. Try it with blackened cod with orange citrus, which highlights the wine's citrus characteristics.

Sonoma County's J Vineyards showcases rich, well-rounded, full-flavored qualities of pinot gris in its California appellation selection. But don't confuse pinot gris with pinot grigio; although they are essentially the same grape variety, there is a difference between the two white wines. Producers of pinot grigio, the Italian pronunciation of the variety, generally craft selections like the Italians do, with youthful, light-bodied characteristics. Producers of pinot gris, the traditional varietal name with roots in Burgundy, France, highlight the fruit's richness, crafting fuller-bodied wines with depth and distinct character. 

J Vineyards and Winery presents this full-flavored, French-style wine made from hand-harvested grapes. While the palate is juicy and light, gracefully displaying the variety's subtle acidity, the taste is lush and textured. Layers of lemon blossom, ripe melon, and tangerine unfold in the aromas, leading to a palate of lilikoi, golden peach, and citrus. Crushed stone lingers on the finish of this 13.8% alcohol wine, lifting the palate. You can find the wine for as low as $11.49 at Costco, though the average is around $13.40.

The sun-drenched Paso Robles vineyards in the heart of California's Central Coast create full-flavored, fruit-forward wines. Daou capitalizes on the region's terroir when producing its Paso Robles sauvignon blanc. With a 13.7% alcohol content, this aromatic white wine opens with zesty notes of lemon-lime citrus, grapefruit, and lemongrass, with underlying wild herbs, soft grasses, and lemon balm. 

It is reminiscent of a lean, grassy, citrus fruit-driven New Zealand sauvignon blanc, though Daou offers a juicier, more well-rounded palate than many from Marlborough. It's a wine to enjoy over an afternoon brunch with pesto-crusted salmon atop a spring salad, energizing your palate from start to finish. Costco's reasonable $12.99 price and its widespread availability make Daou's wine a win-win.

It's easy to walk into a typical grocery store and pick up a bottle of inexpensive wine crafted from a well-known, international grape variety by an established, large-volume producer. Hundreds of shoppers do so daily, oftentimes including me. However, in creating this list, I wanted to highlight Costco's diverse options. This included wines made from varieties that were not as common or well-known. I did this while also including a few larger producers and well-known varieties, rounding out the suggestions. 

To assist in putting together the list and detailing each review, I drew on my knowledge, training, and expertise as a Certified Sommelier, Certified Specialist of Wine, and Spanish Wine Scholar with over 20 years of industry experience as a wine journalist. I have tried each of these wines and can speak to their quality, especially for the affordability that Costco offers.