The Wine Trials 2011 (Wine Trials)

The Wine Trials is the essential under-$15 wine guide that shook the wine world to its core by proving that in brown-bag blind tastings, people actually preferred cheaper wines to more expensive ones.

It all began as a blind tasting academic experiment: Could everyday wine drinkers tell the difference between cheap wine and expensive wine? When the group published its paper showing that they couldn"t, the wine world lit up with controversy. The Wine Trials 2011, by Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch, is the brand-new third edition of the book that grew out of  this experiment--the book that challenged the wine establishment and revealed the widely available wines under $15 that beat out wines costing up to ten times their price in blind tastings.

The Wine Trials 2011 is the biggest and most informative yet, with full-page reviews of 175 all-new wines for 2010, based on completely new blind tastings of the latest vintages, with a special focus on up-and-coming value wine regions like Portugal and Greece. Each review includes a cheeky, unpretentious discussion of each wine"s flavors and aromas, and a photo of the bottle for easy identification.

Alexis Herschkowitsch is the coauthor of five Fearless Critic restaurant guides and a contributor to Fodor"s travel guides. She is a graduate of the University of Texas and has a WSET advanced wine and spirits certificate.Robin Goldstein is author of The Wine Trials and co-author of The Wine Trials 2010 and The Beer Trials. He is a contributor to the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, and has written for more than 30 Fodor's travel guides, from Italy to Argentina to Hong Kong. He has an A.B. in neuroscience and philosophy from Harvard University, a J.D. from the Yale Law School, a certificate in cooking from the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a WSET advanced wine and spirits certificate.