You can sneakily make cheap wine taste more expensive — here’s how

You can easily improve the taste of cheap wine (Picture: Robertson Buckhaven) Few things in life induce anxiety for me more than a £6 bottle of wine. I know, I recommended a £5.49 wine from Aldi last week, but generally, six quid doesn’t buy what it used to. Once the Treasury takes its share, you’ve paid for the glass, label, cork, shipping, warehouse, and various people’s wages along the way; there’s not a lot left for the actual wine. But many of us still have one of these bottles knocking around somewhere. Perhaps it was brought to a barbecue by someone you thought you liked. Or maybe you panic-bought a bottle from the corner shop because it was 9:55pm and you’d already drunk everything else in the house, but then decided you’d had enough. Spoiler alert: that last one was me. Whatever the reason, there it sits. The £6 bottle nobody really wants to open. There’s good news, though. With a few simple tweaks, you can easily make cheap wine taste more expensive. But how best to do that? I asked a top London sommelier what he would do. A top sommelier has shared their tips (Picture: Chris Frayling-Cork) Many sommeliers might not even know £6 wines exist, let alone have tasted one. Most would probably say the best way of making a £6 taste better is to pay £12 for it. But I asked anyway. And I wasn’t after the usual wine-bore advice about using a decent glass, either. I wanted to know how far they were prepared to go. Their mission was to make a £6 wine taste double the price using any method available. Ask Metro Use AI to go deeper into the stories you care about – powered by Metro and trusted publications. Things were about to get vaguely undignified, and I was here for it. For this task, I spoke with Chris Frayling-Cork (who officially has the best name in wine). He’s the former head of wine at The Chancery Rosewood Hotel in Grosvenor Square and is now head sommelier at a three Michelin-starred restaurant. He’s also been voted Top 50 Sommeliers 2026. What would he do with £6 plonk? Change the temperature Before we start bothering the kitchen appliances, there’s one simple hack for red wine. Chill it. I’ve written about the 20:20 rule before: putting reds in the fridge 20 minutes before serving, meanwhile taking whites and rosés out of the fridge at the same time. And according to Chris, giving this a go can make a huge difference to your drink. Put red in the fridge 20 minutes before serving (Picture: Getty Images/EyeEm) ‘I use the 20:20 rule for temperature,’ he says. ‘Literally everyone drinks red wine too warm, which can make it taste overly jammy and alcoholic.’ And the rule works both ways. He continues: ‘For whites, taking it out of the fridge for 20 minutes works especially well for a Chardonnay or something nice and buttery. It really allows those nice oaky and creamy notes to shine!’ Use a blender You could always pop it in a blender (Picture: Robertson Buckhaven) I can already hear the outraged emails being typed. This method is called ‘hyper-decanting’, and it works on the principle that if exposing wine to oxygen for half an hour can open it up, what happens when you expose it to a lot of oxygen in a few seconds. Surprisingly, Chris is on board, admitting he does it at home using a milk frother, for a gentler approach. Those who want to be a bit more ‘extreme’ and don’t mind more of a clean-up can opt for a blender. Blend for a few seconds, and you’ll be staring at something that looks more like a berry smoothie than a wine. ‘Blending will change the wine for certain, and may well soften tannins in a very aggressive young red wine; however, you will lose some fruit character and any more delicate aromatics in the wine,’ the expert explains. But Chris is keen to point out that a blender isn’t the DeLorean from Back to the Future, adding: ’30 seconds in a blender does not equal five years of bottle ageing; the science behind bottle ageing is annoyingly more complicated than just oxygen.’ Add salt A few grains of salt can reduce bitterness (Picture: Robertson Buckhaven) ‘A few grains, not a pinch, of salt can reduce bitterness in a wine while leaving the fruit, aromatics and sweet components untouched,’ Chris advises. He goes on to caution: ‘If you can taste the salt, you’ve gone too far!’ As for which drinks this will work with, go for something like a Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon – beefy reds that can take a bit of tinkering. Water might work Something Chris suggests, which I hadn’t thought of, is adding water. And before you send us both to wine jail, hear him out. ‘You’re effectively taking a leaf out of the whisky handbook and adding a few drops of filtered water to bring the ABV down slightly, which should allow you to enjoy the wine without wincing.’ He recommends doing this if you have a very alcoholic red wine that has bags of flavour, like an Aussie Shiraz. I’ll be honest, diluting wine feels wrong to me, but I’ll leave that one to Chris… Sprinkle in some sugar A little sugar can make wine less sharp (Picture: Robertson Buckhaven) To complete the kitchen cupboard tricks, Chris says: ‘Try adding a drip of sugar syrup to a very thin/acidic white wine. ‘I’d try this with your Pinot Grigio/Sauvignon Blanc.’ Like salt, the goal is not to taste the sugar, ‘just to limit how sharp the wine tastes’. 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