Customer Reviews

The Wine Trials 2010: The World's Bestselling Guide to Inexpensive Wines, with the 150 Winning Wines Under $15 from the Latest Vintages

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

If you have ever walked into a grocery or liquor store to buy a bottle of wine and felt completely at a loss as to what's worth trying and what's not this is the book for you.

Pros: Large selection of wines under $15.00 taste-tested by over 500 volunteers. There is a section which ranks the taste-tested wines within each wine category and another alphabetical section which assigns a one-page review for each taste-tested wine. If you are into it, there are several sections on the background of and process used for the taste-testing.

Cons: The book is too big to slip in your pocket and use unobtrusively when actually shopping for wine. An included tear-sheet or separate quick-guide listing the wines ranked within each category would be helpful.

The strongest aspect of this book is its wry, irreverent destruction of the myths propagated by the self-appoInted oenologists of the world. I was personally gratified to discover on their list as under five dollars a favorite in our household, Crane Lake Sauvignon Blanc, for which I was once charged eighteen dollars in a restaurant - an extravagant markup typical in the States and made issue of in the text. Like many in this world, I am sure, I am also grateful to be able now to ask for a bottle of Freixenet with absolute certainty as to its pronunciation, as well as with knowledge of the difference brut and extra dry. All in all The Wine Trials makes buying wine, especially when it is to be served to guests, both reassuring and more fun.

The best thing about this book for the beginner is that it gives you a lot of wines to choose from that should be easy to find and enjoy. In the past I either wasn't able to track a particular wine down, or once found, hesitated to pay the asking price given the mixed results I'd had to date. As a result I didn't find many wines I liked.

So far, I've tried a half dozen wines recommended in the book and been very happy with them. They were a lot better than the random choices I made from the same grocery store shelves. All in all a good place for the novice to start.

Robin Goldstein is a gadfly. He's notorious for submitting a wine menu from a fictitious restaurant to Wine Spectator magazine and earning the magazine's "Award of Excellence." Yet the "reserve wine list" from his menu listed wines earning some of the lowest scores from the magazine over the previous 20 years.

"The Wine Trials" takes on the commonly used 50- to 100-point wine rating system. Goldstein asks whether the ratings are biased by price, label, and advertising. His tests show that they are, sometimes hugely.

Goldstein wanted to know how cheaper wines - below $15 - rated against more expensive ones, in the $50 to $150 range, and each other in blind, brown-bag tastings. Over several months in 2007 and 2008, he held tastings of 560 wines for everyday wine drinkers and experts. Many of the cheap wines excelled and surpassed the expensive ones.

The result is a set of ranked lists of 100 wines for under $15 by general type -- heavy red, light red, heavy white, light white, etc. -- and by location -- Europe and the "New World" (the Americas, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand). Each of the ranked wines also gets its own description. I've tried several of the top-ranked wines, and they are delicious, some from small, unadvertised labels and some from big producers.

As a buying guide, this is a very useful book, by far the most useful I've seen in a long time. Goldstein's jaundiced look at the wine business, especially the conventional wine rating business, is a bonus.

The book doesn't pretend to be anything like Karen MacNeil's "The Wine Bible" or others in that category. You won't find here detailed descriptions of individual wine grapes, wine growing regions, famous bottlers, characteristics of the terroir, or that kind of information. "The Wine Trials" is all about the unbiased drinking experience. These two books, "The Wine Trials" and "The Wine Bible," have different aims and complement each other well. But just to find inexpensive, drinkable wines, "The Wine Trials" is more useful.

I have two major problems with this book. The first is based on the author's methodology: though the authors firmly believe that price and quality of wine are not strongly related, the expensive wines offered for comparison in blind tests were chosen at random, with price being the only criterion (ie. the expensive wines offered for comparison were not selected at all based on their quality). Second, the title states that the inexpensive wines listed in the book beat out the more expensive wines. But once you read the book, the author's clearly state that this was not the case for the portion of the study group comprised of experienced wine drinkers. In fact, these drinkers preferred the more expensive wines. So although most people can not tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine (and may even prefer cheap wine), people who know wine can tell the difference and prefer more high end wine, even in blind taste tests. I don't really care what most people think, only what i think. And based on sampling several of the top rated wines from this book, i strongly recommend that you not waste your money. I should say, however, that the authors' basic premise is valid - that blind tasting is the only way to judge a wine solely based on how it tastes. And i agree that it should be a part of every wine drinkers experience.

A job well done with very good results for wine lovers. The world of wine is fascinating, because of the experience in tasting it and the ever growing knowledge acquired by it. I believe there should be more studies like the one behind this book. It is about time the truth comes out. Just think about how many mediocre wines are overpriced these days. I understand upstanding wines at very high prices. Making wine is an expensive process. Unfortunately, wine lovers end out buying names instead of good wine.

This book helps a great deal to select quality wine at fair prices. I wonder if the authors plan to continue doing this, at least once every two years. Because in two years or less, it will be difficult if not impossible to find the good wines featured in this book.

With regard to the picks from the book, I have tried a few and there are definitely great wines at affordable prices. By the way, some stores, at least the ones I visit, are raising their prices due to the accuracy of this book.

Look forward to more non-bias wine tasting books such the "trials". I am really thankful...

As its cover says, the book is based on the tasting of about 540 easy-to-find, best-selling wines under $15, by 500 ordinary American wine drinkers. The book's main strength is that it describes the 100 best of these wines, or rather the 100 top-scoring. A hundred choices is a pretty rich shopping list, and the 25 I've worked my way through so far, are all good wines, though some I would never buy again. And I've found a handful that are, to my taste, real gems that I might not have happened upon otherwise.

It's main weakness is that it is hard to sort subtler information out from the simplistic hype on the book jacket. In other words, it would be wrong to conclude from this book that there are a lot of inexpensive wines ( under $15) that will taste better to the "everyday wine drinker" than most expensive ones ( $25 and up). That might be true, but these wine trials don't take us that far down the path of savvier wine-buying.

The massive tasting was designed to produce scientifically and statistically significant results, and on the whole it appears to have been very well done and well analyzed. As I said, the 100 "best" wines they came up with seem quite good. But the main revelation of all the statistical work is not the list of 100 but rather the finding that ordinary American wine-drinkers really do prefer, on average, the flavor of less expensive wines, ie, those under $15.

Just as important, their preference for the flavors of under-$15 wines, though real, is only a slight preference. The book also claims to have found that "wine experts" are just a little different -- that they prefer the flavors of more expensive wines but that their preference too is only slight. This makes sense, but the book does not make clear that the people they identified as experts were really, truly expert. And whether really expert or not, there seems to have been only a handful of them among the 500 tasters.

And while it sounds very authoritative to get the results of 500 tasters working their way through 500+ wines, reading between the lines (17 tasting events, "6000 glasses served") you can deduce that most of the tasters sipped only about dozen wines and few tasted more than 18. (This was verified by one of the authors writing on a wine blog.)

Moreover, by gleaning numbers from various pages you can tell that only about 40 "expensive" wines were included for comparison. With those 40 big-buckeroos assigned to one of 11 flavor types (Euro heavy-white, New World light-white ,the bubblies, Euro heavy-red, etc., etc.), that means only about 4 expensive comparison wines per group. Such small numbers weaken their findings considerably, to my mind. Exactly how many comparison wines there were in each group is impossible to tell, as are the criteria for choosing them. I got the sense that they chose only widely available and "best-selling" expensive wines, but beyond that is is impossible to say.

I've pored over the book's pages the many times, and it puzzles me that this sort of helpful information either isn't there or isn't presented straightforwardly. Other little mysteries? They let it out in passing that more than 100 of the under-$15 wines beat the pricey ones, but they don't say how many did. And is their "everyday wine drinker" actually someone who has a glass or two with dinner most days or are they just average Joes and Josies?

Still, the book has good information on the the variability of taste and the human tongue, the power of price and image over our perception of quality (conspicuous consumption), and the value of blind wine tastings. There is a darn good evaluation form you can copy should you be inspired to stage a tasting of your own. And it fosters a healthy skepticism for the high wine scores that shopkeepers love to post next to their "premium selections" on the upper shelves.

This useful guide proves itself consistently by our tasting experiences. We gave it as XMAS gifts this year and received surprised agreements from our friends.

The book team blind tested 560 wines (including at least some expensive ones), used a good statistics methodolgy that discounted the opinions of people who ranked the same wine differently, and concluded that there were lots of cheap wines that were well liked by the testers (which included "chefs, food professionals, wine distributors, wine professionals, and everyday wine drinkers invited by the editors"

The review below is false when it claims "Only one expensive wine is mentioned in the entire book." In fact, the book states on page 8: "tasters preferred a nine dollar Beringer Founder's Estate Cabernet to a 120 dollar Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet." Also on page 8 "They preferred a Vinho Verde to a Cakebread Chardonnay and a Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru from Louis Latour." Page 21 "the Segura Viudas Brut and the Freixnet beat both Dom Perignon and Veuve Cliquot." The reviewer below obviously didn't even bother to flip through the book. The Wine Trials team seems to have tasted a number of expensive wines.

Although it would be nice if they would reveal the whole list of the 560 wines that they tasted. (They could do that on their website for instance.) And I'd also like to see what the top wines were regardless of price as the book only lists wines under fifteen dollars. It's odd that they don't share that information. Perhaps the "Fearless Critic" was a little fearful of the expensive wine producers?

The book also has a good discussion of their testing methodology and other past wine tests and the placebo effect. Overall an interesting read and a useful reference although I wish they had more info on expensive wines.

In a series of well done experiments on wine tasting, the author Goldstein shows that the price of a wine has little, if any, effect on its rated quality when the taster does not know the price of the wine, or other facts that would influence the ratings of the wine. This sort of double blind testing, where neither the one serving the wine, nor the one tasting it, has any knowledge of how good the wine is "supposed" to be, is the gold standard of scientific evaluation.
Of course, if one knows that a glass of wine comes from a bottle costing $1000, it would be very difficult not to rate it more highly than a glass from a $15 bottle. By "blinding" the raters, the author gives us a much more valid idea of the quality of different wines. Wine snobs will hate this book.
I do have one problem with the author's interpretation of his data. He argues that knowing that a wine has a very high price actually makes it taste better. That's an interesting hypothesis, but his data do not address it. The data merely show that knowing that a wine has a high price results in higher ratings. There is a fairly easy experimental technique called signal detection analysis that the author and his team of experts could have used to answer this question. Signal detection analysis, which is taught to every undergraduate psychology major, allows one to separate changes in bias from changes in the actual sensory experience when some variable like price is being studied. Goldstein is basically arguing that knowledge of the price of a wine actually changes the sensory experience of the taster, as opposed to just making the taster rate the more expensive wine higher with no sensory change. This latter effect is called a change in bias. Both results are possible, as is a combination, where there is both a change in the sensory experience and a change in the rater's bias. It's really too bad that Goldsteing didn't do a signal detection study of his wine tasters. This would have been very easy to do and would have resulted in a much fuller understanding of the effects of price on the sensory experience of wines.
By the way, another reviewer states that the tastings in this book were not done fully blinded. This is simply wrong. The description in the book is of a well conducted double blind experiment.
It was also fascinating to know that the major wine raters are "in bed" with the wine sellers. The major wine magazines that rate wines get huge amounts of advertising revenue from the sellers of the very wines they rate in their pages. Gee - what could be wrong with that?