What would I score this €3.99 wine?

Bubbleheads: I'm currently on holiday for a week. I didn't pause my subs this time because a)I have a tonne of material in my official Six Atmospheres Reserve Individuelle which will be deployed upon my return to make up for a light week, and b) last time I did this I swear it triggered some juju in the Substack algorithm which I don't wish to invoke again.

I'm in Sicily where, apart from it being colder than London is right now, everything is wonderful. I bought some good wine. I also bought what, by rights, should be some proper ‘Chateau Garbage’- €3.99 Catarratto/Chardonnay from a local supermarket. For cooking. It's organic, which is something - but not a huge thing, in this climate.

I find drinking cheap wine pretty interesting. As in, “how is this done”? In this case, it trades very heavily on fruity primary cool-fermentation aromas, and it doesn't have either weird acidity or high residual sugar. It isn't over extracted, or overripe and flabby, or clunky - there is even a bit of substance, of shape, of form. It's completely fine. I'm drinking it.

It even approaches a slightly icky truth which those of us immersed in fine wine have to confront - I have had a great many rather expensive champagnes and sparkling wines that, whilst arguably more complex, or ‘serious’, miss out on being as simplistically sound and ‘easy drinking’. What even is ‘easy drinking’, anyway? Is good wine ever ‘difficult drinking?’

Perhaps I'm just more picky when it comes to Champagne. But little wines like this remind us that, for ordinary drinkers, a bottle at ten times this price (for starters) has some real work to do. Having completed a Decanter tasting of sub-£40 Champagnes recently, despite some very solid efforts I can't say I left scratching my head at the sales woes at this ‘bargain’ end of the market. If a £40 wine is not essentially pleasant, then we have a problem.

Upon my return I shall re-ascend my gilded staircase, and raise a pleased eyebrow when I review a good Champagne that costs less than £80. But, as I ponder a final note and score, a little voice might ask:

What would I score the Catarratto?*

*The honest answer is solid bronze for Decanter, ie around 87 or even 88 by the Decanter points system.