Book Review: The Wine Trials

The tag line to this book says “Brown bag blind tastings reveal the surprising wine values under $15” and it is FASCINATING! The main idea behind this book is that the wines recommended to us by wine critics, magazines, and websites are not actually the wines preferred by everyday wine drinkers. This research was done using 500+ wine tasters from all walks of life (experts and non) and from 17 separate tastings all over the U.S. All I have to say to that is… WHERE… WAS… I???

Anyway, the results are amazing. For example, they compared Dom Perignon, a $150 French champagne, to a $12 sparkling wine from Washington. In a blind tasting, guess which one was preferred 2 to 1… that’s right the cheap one! (It’s Domaine St. Michelle Cuvee Brut for those of you who might go pick it up!) That’s just the beginning. In fact, overall results show that from more that 6,000 glasses of wine served from brown paper bags, people actually preferred the less expensive ones! “Tasters preferred a $9 bottle of Beringer Founders’ Estate Cabernet Sauvignon to a $120 wine from the same grape and same producer: Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.” WHAT!? 

The book goes into theories about why all this is. Mainly image, advertising, selling a lifestyle kind of thing. People buy the $150 Dom because they have heard it’s amazing. It's what cool and rich people drink, and they want to have it. In fact, it DOES taste better BECAUSE of all this. But in a blind tasting, where price, prestige, and even region are concealed, people prefer cheaper wine.

There really is so much more to this book than I have room to write, and the fact that it mixes wine and psychology is why I love it so much. Now the REALLY cool thing about this book is that about ¾ of it is a listing of the top 100 wines that are under $15 and that people actually preferred to the more expensive ones. Some of these make me a little skeptical -  included in this list are some box wines, Yellow Tails, Barefoots, and other wines you might normally pass over in the wine aisle. But you better believe I will be trying some of these in the near future and giving my opinions. GET THIS BOOK!