Our weekly wine tasting ritual in our house is to have a mini-wine tasting, party of two, on Saturday nights. We usually select two wines from one of our wine of month clubs. However, this past Saturday, we tried something a little different.

I had told my husband how impressed I was with my lastest cheap wine selection from 3 Blind Moose, a Cabernet Sauvignon. This got him curious, so he proposed that I pick up a bottle of the Cabernet Sauvignon as well as Merlot at the local grocery store, and we'd try those out on Saturday night.

Against my better judgement, we opened the Merlot first. I knew the Cab was better, so I should have had him start with that, but I didn't think about the fact that my original intent in purchasing the wine was to find good wine that was also cheap wine, not just good wine.

He turned his nose up at the Merlot, and while he agreed the Cabernet Sauvignon was much better, we both agreed neither was up to our usual Saturday night standards. So, it was back to our wine cellar, and he pulled out an Italian vintage, Torciano Merlot Del Veneto 2004, which in the past we found to be excellent. But, alas, it was corked! Ick!

Finally, I turned to a bottle of 2005 Little Penguin Shiraz (more on this later), but by this time, the party had pretty much ended. We understood our earlier mistake. We should have stuck with our original Saturday night routine.

4 bottles and a hard lesson learned!