Cotes du Rhone are medium and fruity. It's supposed to be an easy drinking style, and if you like it, I think there will be no problem getting better value.

Try 'Goats do Roam' red. It is a value wine that tries to mimic the style of the cdr appellation.

I think that this one is almost entirely Grenache. (I looked it up - 100%) Grenache is also grown quite a lot in Spain, and Spanish wines are great old world wines that tend to be a little bit cheaper. Grenache is a sweet grape, so the wines can get a bit 'hot' with alcohol if they are grown in hotter climates (like Spain), but you can still get a fruity strawberry taste from other grapes.

Try merlot, and gammay for fruity and floral wines. If you liked the strawberry hints of grenache, you might like Beaujolais villages.

I really don't know what you mean by astringent here. I think that you might mean 'sour', 'tart' or acidic? Astringent is sort of like an unripe persimmon. If you dislike tartness, all wines do have a lot of that. It's OK not to like it and even not to like wine. Acidity is considered an essential part of wines, and grapes are used over other fruits because they are both high in sugar and high in malic and tartaric acid. In order to soften the acids in wine some different techniques are used. Look for 'Sur lees' on white wines. This means that there has been some malolactic fermentation to soften the malic acid. Chardonnays tend to use this technique.

But if you don't like acid much at all, and you like sweet, try fruit wines, like blackberry, blueberry, or elderberry.

Desert wines are also quite sweet and seem less acidic because of that, but they are expensive, and VERY sweet.

Anyway, if you don't like wines, that's ok. And it's ok to move down the price spectrum too, especially since you like easy drinking wines and don't seem to care much for aged and oaky. Just leaving France should help too.