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Learn to COOK - The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $10.17
Your Save: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 7 to 12 days
Manufacturer: Fearless Critic Media
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.22
EAN: 9780974014357
ISBN: 0974014354
Label: Fearless Critic Media
Manufacturer: Fearless Critic Media
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2008-05-01
Publisher: Fearless Critic Media
Studio: Fearless Critic Media
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Wine Trials
Comment: Very interesting book that shows some wines that are very expensive are not as good as the low priced ones.
Customer Rating:
Summary: good& inexpensive
Comment: It's great to get away from those numerical rated reviews.
This book tells you to discover good wines at sensible prices.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Most helpful.
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The other side of the wine industry
Comment: 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...
Customer Rating:
Summary: An emperor with no cloths.
Comment: 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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