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The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings
written by Robin Goldstein
Studio : Fearless Critic Media
by Fearless Critic Media
Publisher : Fearless Critic Media
Released : 2008-05-01
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780974014357
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 18 reviews)
List Price : $14.95
Our Price : $8.89
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Product Description |
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6,000 glasses of evidence that will change the way you buy wine: Hide the label...and the truth comes out. Acclaimed Fearless Critic Robin Goldstein has gone around the country serving 6,000 glasses of wine from brown paper bags to experts and everyday wine drinkers around America. Here, in print for the first time, are the shocking results, including full-page reviews of the 100 wines that beat $50 to $150 bottles in the blind tastings. |
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Rich sipping list, plus food for thought |
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. |
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The Wine Trials |
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Very interesting book that shows some wines that are very expensive are not as good as the low priced ones. |
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good& inexpensive |
It's great to get away from those numerical rated reviews.
This book tells you to discover good wines at sensible prices. |
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Most helpful. |
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Forget the 100 point review system. Can you really tell the difference between an 89 and a 91? This book will enlighten you to how much you get taken for a ride by a lot of over priced wine, that tastes no better than a twelve dollar bottle. Blind taste tests prove it, and it's all in this book! Have fun with it next time you purchase wine. |
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The other side of the wine industry |
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...
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