Judging wine with another scale

	SUBJECTIVE CASE  To the rigor of our wine tests we add the 60 years' combined experience of our experts.

A friend of mine used to work in radio. She never wore a watch. When I asked her why, she said that she was so used to editing down to fractions of seconds that minutes and hours were easy to estimate.

I, on the other hand, like to see the big picture as well. And so do our wine testers. Not that they don’t evaluate wines scientifically, down to the finest detail. But as you well know, the rigorous methodology we use for all of our product testing incorporates the consumer perspective. There are plenty of wine reviews out there, but we hope you’ll find our wine report especially helpful.

In choosing wines to rate, we look to producers who did well in our previous tests. The winemaker must have bottled enough of the wine for you to find it easily, and we look for reasonably priced choices. We include some wines that have generated a buzz in other publications. At times we agree, but not always. Some things that make our Ratings (available to subscribers) different:

We rate wines in categories ranging from excellent to poor, rather than with the 100-point scale used by many high-profile wine critics. We enlist the trained palates of two wine experts with almost 60 years of combined experience; we (and they) believe that there’s too much subjectivity in wine tasting to declare a bottle a 90, say, instead of an 89.

Now, 90 can be a magic number at least in terms of sales. Wine-store owners know it and readily slap those 90-plus labels on their shelves. That helps sell a particular wine and can boost the reputation of the magazine from which the kudos came. You won’t, however, read “Consumer Reports rates this wine ‘excellent’ ” on those shelves or in any advertising, since we don’t allow the use of our Ratings to promote products. Nor do we run ads in our magazine, so you’ll never see a glossy wine ad opposite our Ratings of the same wine.

We buy a lot of styles within a varietal--say, chardonnay--to cover a broad range of characteristics, prices, and regions. Before testing starts, training sessions help us identify wines that can establish a gold standard for excellence. Our testers already know, of course, what a typical chardonnay is; their goal is to agree on rating methods and descriptive terms. As always, our secret shoppers buy wines anonymously at retail. We don‘t accept freebies from the winemaker, so there’s no chance that we’ll get a bottle specially selected to impress us.

All samples are served in glasses marked only with a random code, so tasters don’t know which wine they’ve been served. Every wine is tasted at least four times, each time from a different bottle to account for bottle-to-bottle variations and a range of storage conditions.

We use the same rigor and fairness in testing wines as we do with all products we rate. We hope that helps you develop your own taste and allows you, as always, to find the best value in the products you buy, from watches to wine.