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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.