In the spirit of helping to make that San Antonio wine shopping experience just a bit friendlier, Three Nine Wine is introducing our Guide to San Antonio Wine Stores, Shops and Merchants. The guide is a Google Maps mashup of our favorite places to shop for and find great deals on red, white & sparkling wines in San Antonio.

Screenshot from our Guide to San Antonio Wine Stores, Shops and Merchants

From superstores like Walmart, to grocery stores like HEB, to chains like Gabriel’s and Spec’s, to local wine shops like Saglimbeni’s, the Guide to San Antonio Wine Stores is where you’ll find information about who has some of the best deals on wine in SA plus ratings from Three Nine Wine and links to user generated reviews from sources like Yelp. We’ve also started experimenting with how to share tips and check-ins from location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Though still in beta, we decided to open things up to the public as we build and you can now access the guide anytime via the link San Antonio Wine Stores which we recently added to our main navigation menu above.

And to give you a little glimpse into what’s coming down the road at Three Nine Wine, we’re working on taking all the information we’re creating and collecting on San Antonio wine stores, reviews and ratings (along with our wine reviews spreadsheet) and curating it into a special version of the web site optimized to help you use your smart phone or favorite mobile device to find an awesome bottle of wine at a great price in San Antonio.

image of G1 from T-Mobile Launch Event photo by Flickr user MobileBurn

Ultimately, we think it could be pretty interesting to build a layer of augmented reality services on top of all this wine data and release it as a downloadable app for Android devices, the iPhone and iPad with the hope of delivering the ultimate mobile shopping experience for tech savvy San Antonio wine consumers.

Stay tuned — and if you have any feedback or input, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thanks for visiting Three Nine Wine.

The Whimsical aisle of the HEB wine section.

If I were a wine maker, I’m not sure how I’d feel about seeing the fruits of my labor categorized as “Whimsical”. I do know that when shopping for wine, I tend to skip that aisle. I may have to rethink that usual route because though it is a non vintage wine, I thought the Barefoot Chardonnay offered an experience similar to that of some well made, moderately priced wines often seen on the shelves of a merchant’s Chardonnay or California section.

Now, if you’re searching for the kind of complexity that you might get from an old world Chardonnay-based white Burgundy then obviously this may not be the wine for you. Still, for the $6.99 I paid at HEB, I thought the Barefoot Cellars Chardonnay delivered plenty of value. (I also saw it for $4.97 at Walmart who btw carries another value priced California Chardonnay you may want to check out)

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While trying to come up with a useful way to capture what this wine is all about, I ran across this quote on the The Wine Buyer from Barefoot Wine Maker Jennifer Wall:

“The wines are affordable, varietally correct, soft and approachable and are immediately ready to drink off the shelf.”

That sums up the Barefoot Cellars Chardonnay pretty well.

Wine Name: Barefoot Cellars Chardonnay California
Three Nine Wine Rating: ***½~ (3.5/5)

Related link: Cork’d Wine Reviews for Non Vintage Barefoot Cellars Chardonnay

Note: Not sure if this was a permanent price reduction or a temporary sale, but after writing this I saw the price for the Barefoot Cellars Chardonnay had been reduced at HEB.

$2.97!?!….Walmart?!?….This is not going to be good for anyone…

Well…it turns out I actually enjoyed this wine.

Now it’s possible that my generally positive reaction was merely a result of some very low expectations going in, and this wine is really not as good as I think it is. Only better than I thought it was going to be.

Either way, for $2.97 it struck me as a wonderful bargain. And not only for drinking.

I was trying this wine while preparing a pan seared Tilapia for dinner and used it to liberally deglaze the pan to create the foundation for an awesome sauce.

Chef juice, indeed. (hat tip to Heather)

Over the holidays, I was fortunate to get the opportunity to sample a variety of higher priced Chardonnays and I can’t say that I found this wine to be better than those wines costing more than 10 times as much. I didn’t — though pleasant and easy to drink, the Oak Leaf Vineyards Chardonnay did come across as a pretty simple wine. Still, I’d be interested in seeing how it held up in a blind tasting.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it performed better than a lot of people could ever imagine.

Ultimately, for the price, I think it’s tough to beat the value this wine delivers. Not to mention the added bonus of mingling with the people of Walmart when you shop.

Wine: Oak Leaf Vineyards Chardonnay
Three Nine Wine rating: ***½~ (3.5/5)