Wine: What you can get when you spend $100

Consumer Reports' Ratings of wine, available to subscribers, primarily aim to identify fine values: pleasing bottles that typically cost $8 to $15. But it's instructive—as well as fun, of course—to survey, occasionally, what you can get from bottles that cost 10 or so times as much.

That's what Maxine Siegel, who leads Consumer Reports' wine-testing program, and I did this past weekend at the New York Wine Experience. The show, put on by Wine Spectator magazine, featured samples of select bottles the magazine had rated at 90 points or higher, a level WS deems to be "outstanding." The price of the wines started at around $50 a bottle, and while most seemed to be in the $90-to-$130 range, there were even a few $200-plus bottles.

Here are my wine-stained notes from the event, based on sampling only a fraction of the show's wines:

Most of the very expensive wines were extraordinary. That might seem obvious, given their price tags of $100 or more. But Consumer Reports' tests quite often turn up wines priced at $25 or more that score below those costing a fraction of that. And skeptical consumers often ask me if I think there is any true distinction to wines with three-figure prices.

Admittedly, our sampling at the show—we took small tastes that we spat out, to maximize the number of wines we could try—was far less rigorous and authoritative than the tests we undertake at CR to rate wines. And the two wine experts who evaluate wines for us taste multiple samples of each wine in "blind" tests, whereas we were tasting single samples and were aware of the brand in question. Nonetheless, Maxine and I found many of the wines to be memorable, with many possessing a special character that was striking and deeply satisfying.

There were many examples, including two cabernets we tried from California's Napa Valley. The Lewis Cabernet Sauvignon 2008 Reserve seemed to us to have a massive richness, with strong notes of chocolate. Yet it avoided being unbalanced or overwhelming in its intensity. And the Hillside Select 2007 struck us as offering great smoothness combined with mouth-puckering tannins that provided a mouth-filling structure.

Many top-of-the-line wines from major producers were merely delicious. In addition to a host of less widely known producers, such as Shafer Vineyards and Lewis Cellars, the show featured premium offerings from some big-name wineries, including Sterling Vineyards and Beringer Vineyards.

In any other show, these might have been standouts. Virtually all such wines we tasted were extremely pleasing, and most cost less than the boutique offerings—often a mere $60 or $80, say. But for the most part, they lacked the singular character of wines from the lesser-known wineries.

Occasionally—as with another silky cabernet, from Louis M. Martini—these wines reminded me of far less expensive offerings I liked from the producer, without being dramatically more pleasing. That observation mirrors what we've sometimes observed in tests comparing regular versions of wines to Reserve versions that cost $5 or so more: The pricier version isn't always worth the extra money.

Sometimes $100 buys left-field novelty. Unsurprisingly, the show was dominated by the likes of California cabernets, French Bordeaux, California and Oregon pinot noirs, German rieslings, Champagnes, and other well-known varietals. Yet there was also the likes of a Ribolla, an almost indescribable (and, I found, rather curious) white varietal from Slovenia; a 2004 Schramsberg J. Schram Rosé, a fascinating and rare attempt at creating a vintage sparkling rosé; and a riesling from Canada's Niagara wine region, one of a handful of north-of-the-border wines at the show.

—Paul Reynolds