The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind...

The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings | Robin Goldstein | The other side of the wine industry

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	The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings Robin Goldstein Fearless Critic Media, 2008 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

A valuable guide

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.

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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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Fun book, although I wish there was more complete data

I enjoy the premise and concept of this book, and have been happy with the recommended wines that I have tried so far. Descriptions are short, tangible, and accurate. I have enjoyed the challenge to some of my opinions, and plan to host a blind tasting with friends in the near future. This book is a quick read and a handy reference, and each review includes a picture of the bottle, which is great for someone like me with a visual memory.

I was disappointed that there were not complete lists and rankings of the wines tested, but I guess there needs to be some material for a sequel, which I plan to purchase. Would have been five stars with a list for each category.

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Wine Trials

The book "The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings" is a valuable guide for wine drinkers that ignores the mystique associated with high priced wines and offers a straight forward blind taste test. The results of the test show most people would prefer wines under $15 over $50 to $150 wines.

A great book to peruse before shopping for that next dinner wine.

An emperor with no cloths.

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?

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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