Todd Pinkerton

Now that I’ve been baptized in the 4HWW, I’ve been following the author Tim Ferriss’s blog. One post I found very practical was “5 World-Class Vices for less than $5“. In it, Tim describes a few items that are the best in the world of their types — wines, chocolate, etc — but are very low cost. I’ve been trying to find all of the items mentioned in the article and many more in the comments.

But more abstractly, this got me thinking about value. I define value as ‘high quality for a relatively low cost, relative to other options’. For example, the Bugatti Veyron is an amazing car. It has some of the best engineering ever devised by man, it is incredibly fast, and at $1.4M pretty expensive. However you measure it, it is of very high quality. But it is probably not a very good value. If you use your car to go to work and the grocery store, a $10k used Nissan is probably a much better value to you. The Nissan has less quality than the Bugatti, to be sure, but the utility, performance, and maintainability make it quite valuable (at least, in the context of everyday driving).

So Tim and his readers list some great values for <$10 or so. Wine is a common one, as there is a huge selection of wines ranging from <$5 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, so there's a lot of room for value to appear. Trader Joes happens to carry a lot of sub- $5 and sub- $10 wines, some of which are quite good. The same goes for chocolate -- you can get some of the best chocolate in the world for less than $10 per bar. So most of the items on Tim's blog post are about wine and chocolate, but are there other items that you've discovered that are of great value?

I enjoy good (really good) beer, and I think it falls into this category. Some of the best beers in the world can be had for less than $10 for a 1 liter bottle, which means you can sample lots of them, or drink your favorite every day. The most highly rated wines in the world cost hundreds of dollars, and even if you can afford it you probably don't make an everyday occurrence of it. Beer comes in just as many varieties and can be had in single bottles at many grocery or liquor stores. Even Whole Foods or TJ's carries a decent selection of beers from all over the world.

Tim's list:

• Dolfin 88% Pure Cacao Belgian Dark Chocolate
• Blue Fin 2005 California Chardonnay (available at Trader Joe’s)
• Valrhona Le Noir Amer 71% Cacao Dark Chocolate (also at TJ’s, and other places)
• Original Flavor with Almonds Bumble Bar (online, but haven’t found any local retailers)
• La Famiglia 2001 Sangiovese (Mondavi) TJs used to carry, by mine no longer does

also recommended were Argentine Malbec wines and Gamay wines. TJs carries some of both varieties.

commenters on Tim’s post mentioned some more values:

wines:

• Tesco Premier Cru champagne is only £14.24 (UK only)
• South African Pinotages (TJ’s and others)
• 2 buck chuck (Charles Shaw) (TJs)
• Trumpeter Cabernet Sauvignon — Buenos Aires (greatcorks.com)

chocolate:

• Michael Recchiuti Chocolate from San Francisco –
• Chocophilia
• Rausch 40g-bars, or Lindt Schokolade — berlin
• Kinder — germany, some specialty stores in US (like Cardullos in Cambridge)
• Both E. Guittard and Scharffen Berger chocolates — SF / USA
• Extreme Dark Chocolate from Endangered Species Chocolate
• drinking chocolate recipe
  Green and Blacks dark chocolate (US / Whole Foods / elsewhere)
• Dagoba chococate bars
• Xocolatl with cacao nibs, chilis, maca, vanilla and nutmeg
• For truffles, definitely Recchiuti, Teuscher, Richart and Charles Chocolates
• Plantations — chocolate bars
• Casa Don Puglisi Pure Chocolate from Modica (not cheap?)
• Santander chocolate from Colombia

coffee / tea:

• Rishi Tea
• intelligentsia coffee — chicago

I’ll add to that some of my favorite beers (many also available at TJ’s):

• Ommegang brewery — Hennepin, Three Philosophers, and others
• duvel
• La Fin Du Monde
• Sam Smith porter
• Young’s double chocolate stout
• Dogfish 90-minute IPA, raison d’etre, and apricot ale
• Allegash

So what other things do you consider to be of great value, especially on the low-cost end? It doesn’t have to be food or drink, either — those were just some examples. But I’m sure if you look around, you’ll find some things you love that don’t break the bank.