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How to choose inexpensive wine (March 26, 2010)

By Kimberly Nicoletti

Not all wines priced under $15 are created equally. So how is an amateur to choose the best one?

Enter “Good, Better, Best Wines,” set to be released in April. The 238-page book ranks big-brand, popular wines by varietal and price, with tasting notes and handy drawings of the bottles themselves, for easy recognition in stores.

Author Carolyn Evans Hammond is a wine writer who is stepping away from the “verbose, irrelevant, wayward, noun-strewn-as-adjective criticism” found in many wine assessments. Instead, she's going for addressing the simple facts: What does the wine taste like and is it offered in most stores, at a good price?

She reviews wines from the top 120 brands, as ranked by The Beverage Information Group's “Wine Handbook.” Specifically, she has taste-tested $5-$7.99 Chardonnays side by side to determine the best ones, then tested $8-$10.99 bottles side-by-side, then $11-$15. She continued this with the most popular varieties sold in the United States: pinot grigios, sauvignon blancs, merlots, cabernet sauvignons and more. Since most Americans drink American wines, she focused on these, though not exclusively.

“A useful guide to popular wines is necessary given that Americans already spend more money on wine than any other nation,” she writes. “The United States will drink more wine than any other country by 2012, and the vast majority of the wine Americans drink is popular big brands that sell for less than $15 a bottle.”

Her book starts with a few “trade secrets,” orienting people to big-brand wine, including topics such as boxed wine, screw caps, price and proper storage and serving techniques. Then she simply compares wines, taking, for example, nine pinot grigios and first separating them by price range and then placing them in “good,” “better” and “best” categories, with a brief description of her reasoning.

The last chapter puts “party wines” to the test, providing quick visuals on the best (and good and better) wines for each occasion, from weddings to cocktail parties, dinner parties and backyard barbecues.

Overall, the book is packed with user-friendly, quick references for the most popular wines in America.

To see the review on the source website please click here.