Consistency is the difference between great cheap wine and ordinary cheap wine. Two Buck Chuck, for all of its acclaim, does not taste the same from year to year, and its quality goes up and down with regularity. Even better made wines, like Meridian, suffer from this problem. One vintage will be terrific and the next will be much less than that (which is why its chardonnay is dropping out of the $10 Hall of Fame next year).

Bogle’s wines, on the other hand, do not have this problem. I have been writing about cheap wine for almost 20 years, and for almost 20 years I have always depended on Bogle. It has never let me down. The petite sirah ($10, purchased, widely available) is the winery’s showpiece, an outstanding example of the producer’s quality and consistency. It is always clean and always varietally correct, which means it’s not the same thing as a syrah and is not made to taste like one. This is saying something given the current trend toward blending varietal wines to make them sweeter and fruitier in a misguided attempt to appease the American palate.

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Look for berry fruit, a touch of oak, and tannins at the end that give the wine some welcome oomph. This is a burly red meat wine — pot roast and gravy, stews that have been cooking all day, and the like. Highly recommended, and the kind of cheap wine that makes writing about cheap wine a pleasure.

One shameless plug: I’m celebrating the third birthday of my wine blog, The Wine Curmudgeon, with prize giveaways the rest of the week. Today, it’s a bottle of Tormaresca Neprica — stop by and enter the contest.