Book Review: The Wine Trials 2010
I’ve often been influenced by external factors when tasting wines. Out driving through vineyards on a nice day, talking with the winery employees, having a good time, and everything just tastes good. Later, in the friendly confines of my house, I’ll pour myself a glass of something, take a swig, mince and frown and make a funny face all the while saying “what the heck was I thinking when I bought this?”
Wine critics are not immune. The conditions under which they taste and evaluate wines has come under fire recently, such as when Dr. Vino traded jabs with Robert Parker over a Wine Advocate employee getting a tasting trip paid for. I am sure that most critics are as objective as possible; it’s just so difficult to separate the wine from the experience of wine. Wouldn’t the best, most objective, evaluation of a wine be done without any outside influence, including the the name on the label? This is called tasting blind, and it produces the best wine tasting results.
Thus, I’m a blind tasting guy, and so are Alexis Herschkowitsch & Robin Goldstein. You can read all about it in their updated edition of The Wine Trials 2010. Goldstein picked up a bit of notoriety last year when he threw Wine Spectator a curveball by entering their Award of Excellence program with a fake restaurant and was placed on their excellent list.
When I first flipped through The Wine Trials, I thought it was going to be useless. The heart of the book is page after page of cheap wines. They note the price, the label, the notes, and call some “winners” and others “values.” In short, at first glance it looked like a glorified wine blog that someone had bothered to print out. The substance of these reviews, though, comes out when you read the six chapter introduction and the short statistical nerd-fest at the end. The opening chapters of The Wine Trials 2010 is almost a manifesto for why Goldstein would pull a stunt like make up a restaurant and pay $250 to get it on the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence list. The entrenched elite wine critic establishment is not as reputable as they claim and this, he argues, must not stand.
The thesis of the book is this: price and pleasure do not correlate when it comes to wine and non-expert wine drinkers actually prefer inexpensive wine to expensive wine. The authors make a very strong case for it. Using the results of hundreds of blind tasters, they ranked inexpensive wines and set out to prove that the cheap wines can stand up to the wallet-busters.
The back part of the book… well, it’s a good time. is just jammed with stuff out of my 4000 level stat classes.
In a linear regression, this allows both the intercept and the slope coefficient to differ for both experts and non-experts.
You like that, do you? Yeah. You love it. Read it again. Go ahead… I’ll wait.
If you’re not into this sort of thing I can summarize for you. They’re proving that their results are statistically significant. This means that they’ve asked enough people to make your stat professor stroke his mustache and nod in stoic approval.
So you put all that together and you find out how they came to all the reviews and notes in the middle of the book. The book no longer looks like compendium of paragraphs posted by some wingnut on the Internet (see also: Blog (n.)). It is an awards program, if you will, for cheap wines. The judges were a long array of blind tasters and their cumulative blind tasting experience comes together to pick some winners.
I agree with most of the winners. Chateau St. Michelle (highlighted in the book) in particular is one of my favorite US producers, especially their Riesling. Other winners included Bogle, Fetzer, and Black Box wine. The book is a good piece of work and it would be nice to have in your back pocket next time you’re browsing through the sea of $15 wines at your local mega-shop.
This book was provided to me as a press sample. It feels so good to say that.
January 27th, 2010 at 7:39 am
Man, that’s cool stuff. Seems like Chateau St. Michelle always rises to the top with these things. Great value. I’ll pick it up (maybe even through your link there
)
February 10th, 2010 at 10:29 am
Glad to hear you liked the book – you’ve definitely captured the essence of what it hopes to accomplish. If you try out any more of the winners, let us know how you like them.