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| Wine Spectator | 
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| Publisher: Shanken Communications
Category: Magazine
List Price: $79.20
Buy New: $49.95
You Save: $29.25 (37%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 166
Format: Magazine Subscription
Type: Consumer magazine
Subscription Issues: 16
Subscription Length: 12 Months
Issues Per Year: 16
First Issue Lead Time: 6-10 Weeks
ASIN: B00006GXD4
Release Date: November 23, 2001
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 1 to 3 months
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| Customer Reviews:
Wine Reviews, News, and More December 22, 2005
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Wine Spectator is a good wine magazine that seeks to keep the reader informed about new wine products, wine facts and education, and wine events. This magazine is published 17 times per year, so it is available often enough that most wine lovers will have more than their fill of reading material.
Most of the material in Wine Spectator deals with buying wine, and you can expect to find several rating lists in every issue. The editors of the magazine supply the majority of the wine ratings, so when you read that one wine earned 95 points and another only 80, you need to keep in mind that these ratings are from the perspective of people who have sampled hundreds or even thousands of different wines. And with each rating or analysis, there is often contact information, such as the name of the winery or web page, so that you can learn more and/or inquire on making a purchase.
To help shoppers find the wines in each issue, Wine Spectator includes a detachable card that includes the names of the different featured wines. This is a handy addition, because it eliminates the need to copy down names of wine on paper or attempt to memorize the titles. All you do is check off the wines you like on the card and take it with you to your favorite beverage store for easy reference.
Wine Spectator seems to have an obsession with lists and with outlandish proclamations. It is common to find lists like "World's 100 Greatest Pinot" or "The 50 Finest California Reds". Consumers are attracted to listings, and that is probably why the magazine gave in and made lists a regular part of most issues. And it is common to find extreme statements like "This is the best Cabernet Sauvignon on the Planet" or "Greatest German White Wine Ever". The publication does this to attract attention and sell more issues, but it could get annoying to some readers.
In spite of these few annoyances, Wine Spectator is still a good magazine. The writers at Wine Spectator are very good, very convincing, and very persuasive. They really know wine, and it comes through in their articles and recommendations. The editors articulate themselves very well and they know just the right way to describe the different brands and styles. It all adds up to a very informative magazine publication on the world of wine.
 About Wine Spectator July 28, 2005
As Mr. Michael J Edelman points out in his comment, this magazine is helping people talk about a lot of things they don't quite understand. I mean what's the point of knowing that a wine has certain characteristics if you can't actually notice them? Still, Wine Spectator is the Best wine magazine today; it has the best articles and the best staff.
If you want to be, as Mr. Edelman states, a yuppie blabbing about "cherry and oak", go ahead and buy it. If you want to know about the ongoing discussion about cork vs plastic, buy it. If you want to know a little more about wines, buy it.
What I truly recommend is, buy the subscription, buy lots of wines and try them, understand your tastes. Once you can tell one wine from another without looking at the bottle, you can talk about wine.
 The Magazine That Created The Modern Wine Snob July 15, 2003
44 out of 87 found this review helpful
Used to be on the most pretentious types walked around talking about vintages and vinyards and things like nose and legs and such. Thanks to Robert Parker and The Wine Spectator, now every pretentious yuppie with a few bucks can be heard to go on and on about "roasted plum scent" and "tobacco undertones" and other such pretentious rot. Stores have contributed to this mess, too; go into any wine shop or grocery and you'll see bottles with tags saying "Wine Spectator 87! Rasberries and Citrus!" and other nonsense. Truth of the matter is 90% of the wines found in The Wine Spectator will never be found in your local wine shop, so all these reviews are just fodder for pretentious yuppies. And in any case, wine is a personal and subjective matter that cannot be reduced to a simple number. Save the money you'd spend on this, and instead make friends with your loal wine merchant. He or seh will give you far better advice. Unless, that it, he or she is a fan of Parker....
 Review of the Decade, 100 points! Oh please... June 4, 2003
126 out of 126 found this review helpful
Wine Spectator is the most prominent and widely available wine criticism magazine and as such it has been endlessly pilloried. Well, they deserve it - one recent issue's cover story was "Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman, Hollywood Power Couple!" How ridiculous can you get? The pages are littered with articles devoted to wealthy Californians and their extensive cellars; one recently spent an entire article on a rich man who helps his rich friends by cataloguing their cellars on, gasp, a spreadsheet! Yeah, it's like that. Wine Spectator has also been criticized for the way it uses hyperbole to the extent that no one believes them when they're right anymore. Oenophiles now wait for Robert Parker (Wine Advocate) to back them up before believing it. "Best Vintage since 1961" and "Vintage of the Century" and "Vintage of the Decade" are far too common copy, coming once a year or so. The vintner profiles hold some interest, but don't fool yourself, you read this magazine for the scoring. Wine Spectator has the resources to taste more wines than any other English language publication (that I know of) and despite some strange results, are generally good at evaluating the bottles in question. As I've noted elsewhere, in spite of the hyperbolic headlines, the Spectator is stingier than Robert Parker for rating wines "Outstanding." The caveat is that a lot of wines get bunched up in the 84-86 point range, although I suppose that matches my experience. By comparison to the Wine Advocate, I find Wine Spectator scores much more inconsistent. This makes sense because the Spectator has a larger staff and it's difficult to establish a common benchmark across all of the offices and tasting panels. In their favor, they do review a fair number of lower priced wines, more than their aforementioned colleague, and their reactions are more or less in the ballpark as to where I'd put them if I were doing the reviews. But know when using the Spectator to allow some give on either side, a confidence interval, if you will. It might be terrible that a magazine wastes its first three quarters of every issue on mindless fodder for social climbers. It might be tasteless that they spend so much time promoting the notion that wine is an investment, instead of an immensely enjoyable consumable commodity. But those of us with big brains and modest credit ratings know that there is much to be salvaged from the back of each issue. We also know that Parker is the first point of reference.
Attractive magazine focusing on upmarket wines December 31, 2002
14 out of 18 found this review helpful
Wine Spectator is an enjoyable magazine that's well-laid out and often interesting to read. However, it mainly focuses on pricey wines (as it should, being a pricey magazine), and the articles about wine-related subjects like matching cheese with wine are sometimes lacking in depth. Still, it's a pleasant magazine which immerses its readers in the culture of wine, and each issue does highlight a few modestly-priced wines.
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