Very interesting book that shows some wines that are very expensive are not as good as the low priced ones.

It's great to get away from those numerical rated reviews.
This book tells you to discover good wines at sensible prices.

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.

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...

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?

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 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.

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.

For an author that is not a wine critic, nor trained in wine tasting, wine fermenting etc. it is shocking to see so many false statements, innuneono etc. tossed at the wine industy. The wine selected were not fully blind tested. They were staged for the unsuspecting public. In most instances he did not go to wine tasters for opinion, but rather folks off the street whom were not educated in wine tasting.

This is the same "author" that recently pulled hoaxes on major magazines, laughed about it, just to sell this book.

Book is not worth a plug nicle or a bottle of Ripple.

This is hands down the best book out there for the casual value-conscious wine drinker. Goldstein and Herschkowitsch have hit the nail on the head. The book uses honest reports from blind tastings staffed by regular people and experienced tasters. The book uses data from these tastings to tell you how to shop for quality wines when on a budget. You can see that the big vineyards have no influence on the ratings, as some of the highest rated wines are from small producers. I take it with me now on every trip to the wine shop. Well Done!

I used standard shipping and the book arrived very quickly, much faster than anticipated. I thought the authors did a great job on that front. There are some other authors out there whose books don't ship on time, so I guess they are more liars than authors. That's OK for fiction, but I think this one is non-fiction so I am glad.

Skip or skim the first 62 pages (wine tastes are subjective, the industry is complicated, our trials were conducted fairly, we are oh-so-clever and funny, yada yada yada) and dive into the lists and the alphabetically organized reviews.

Now, carry this into your favorite wine shop and ask the clerk/purveyor/manager to help you find the wines you've already flagged on pages with post-it stickers or spit or thumbtacks. My wine guy was delighted to see that I had this book... and he also used the "best of" selections to guide me to a couple of other inexpensive and less well-known varieties that he (correctly!) told me were good. No shame there!

Keep a pen with you to note your own opinions and facts in the book. For example, it turned out that the sparkling wine winner listed at twelve bucks actually cost me only $8.99 at World Market. Certainly that's worth writing down, don't you think?

Last advice of all: Buy multiple copies and keep the extras on hand. I just ordered my fourth because this makes a GREAT gift when you pair it with, say, two or four or six or so bottles of the wines in the book. (The volume of wine accompanying the book depends on the volume of your regard for the intended recipient. Or what's left in the current paycheck.) I'm bringing it as a hostess gift to my next dinner party... 'cause we still have that kind of tradition here in the South. ;]

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.

this item hasn't arrived, to the date 07-28-08 suposed to arrived 3 weeks a go even thow is international shipping something wrong is with the parcel service
can AMAZON do something about it?
Thanks

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.

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.

This book is a lot of fun, giving opportunities to get family and friends together and do your own wine tastings. I found many wines served in good restaurants in this book. See The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings

I first read about this book from Eric Asimov, wine writer for the New York Times, in his "The Pour" blog. Mr. Asimov had mixed feelings about the book before even reviewing it. Seeing as the fundamental theory of the book runs fully in the face of the current wine establishment (that more expensive wine = better wine), the authors set out to objectively prove that widely available wines can be both inexpensive and very enjoyable, in a full range of styles (Old Word Heavy Reds, New World Light Whites, etc.). You can read a fuller review of this great and thought-provoking book on my food and wine blog, [...]