Although the rosé was one of more than 3000 different wines to get a silver medal in the competition, the challenge, which is owned and run by the company behind the World’s 50 Best Restaurants , is nevertheless a major award on the European wine calendar.

The wine retails at the supermarket chain’s UK stores for £6 (which has been reported as $8, but is currently around AU$10.42). It recently came home from the International Wine Challenge with a silver medal.

If you’ve spent time on the internet this week, you may have noticed the excitement around Aldi’s 2016 Côtes de Provence rosé.

Manage your expectations While there are plenty of small vignerons growing their own grapes and making their own wine, that’s not what you’re buying here.

So for times when a bottle of wine might be necessary, but it’s also necessary to spend as little as possible, we asked a former wine judge how to get the most from your money.

At Broadsheet we value good experiences, but sometimes you’re short on cash, or you’ve just paid the rent, or you find yourself in a country town where the only bottle shop is also the service station.

At this price point you’re looking at wines from large companies with huge wine making facilities, buying grapes from multiple growers.

This doesn’t mean the wines are bad; it’s simple economies of scale. To make wine cheap, brands need to make a lot of it. To make thousands and thousands of bottles, they need a consistent supply of bulk grapes, and that has to come from a range of sources.

Traditionally, South Australia’s Riverland is where most of Australia’s bulk grapes come from. It’s an area with good soil, sunshine and a decent water supply – but bulk wine now comes from (and is made) around the country.

Look for regional strengths

Most cheap wine is made from blends. It doesn’t come from just one winery, or even one region. Even so, if the label gives you a region, then knowing what that region is celebrated for will help give you a guide to whether you’re getting something reasonable.

The silver-medal-winning Aldi rosé was from Provence, a region in France’s south that’s world renowned for that style.

Similarly, in Australia a cheap semillon sauvignon blanc from Margaret River will generally be decent simply because you generally can’t go wrong with semillon sauvignon from that area.

Other Australian go-tos include Barossa shiraz and Coonawarra cabernet.

Medals don’t always mean much

Back in the day, certain large-scale wineries were fond of adorning their bottles with gold stickers that proclaimed nothing more than a wine’s suitability with pizza. Ever since, the wine-buying public has been a little suspicious of shiny stickers, and for good reason.

Despite claims of competitions being “wine Olympics”, in most wine shows the gold-silver-bronze medal system is based on a sliding scale of quality, rather than a reflection of entries placing first, second or third. This means it’s possible for a great number of wines to be awarded a medal. With the Aldi rosé being one of 3000 silver-medal winners, out of almost 15,000 wines that won a medal or commendation in the competition.

As far as show results go, trophies – an award given to a single wine across a broad range of categories such as best red, white or sparkling – are a much stronger indicator of quality.

Cleanskins still aren’t a dirty word

A lot of restaurant house wines are re-badged cleanskins, or wines with no labels. At this point, the fact they can be surprisingly good quality is no surprise.

Cleanskins make it onto the market for a few reasons. Grape orders get cancelled, wineries experiment with trial batches, export orders get canned, and sometimes big wineries leave growers with a surplus of grapes they have to move.

Whatever the reason, your best bet is to head to a specialty cleanskin shop, which will let you try before you buy. Even though cleanskins can be excellent value for money, they can also be a gamble.

But what about Aldi’s rosé?

While the wine that’s caused this week’s fuss isn’t available in Australia, the rosé you can find in stores here is actually even cheaper: Aldi’s South Point Estate rosé retails for $5, and has also beaten more expensive wines in competition.