Dressing in style: best balsamic vinaigrettes.(up front: News / Trends / Advice)(Buyers Guide)

If you've shopped in the condiment aisle lately, you've probably noticed that salad-dressing standbys such as Kraft and Wish-Bone are being jostled by fancier fare from well-known restaurants, chefs, specialty shops, and a couple of fellows who have made their name in other venues: Don Imus and Paul Newman. To determine how famous names compare with famous brands, we asked four trained sensory panelists to taste seven gourmet dressings and two leading brands, plain and on lettuce. Prices of the products range from 22 to 50 cents per 2 tablespoons. The flavor: balsamic vinaigrette, a widely sold choice. Between tastes, panelists cleansed their palates with water, apple slices, and unsalted crackers.

We found one clear winner, deemed excellent, and three very good runners-up. Although all four were of high quality, they tasted quite different. Here's how our tasters described them:

The Silver Palate Country Salad Splash. Sweet and fruity, with a distinct balsamic-vinegar flavor. Full, complex dressing gives impression it was freshly prepared. Should go well with a wide range of salad ingredients. Less sodium than others.

Maple Grove Farms of Vermont. Sweet, with a complex caramelized flavor. Far fewer calories and less fat than the other dressings we tested.

Drew's All Natural Rosemary. Thicker than most. Big dijon-mustard flavor, with black pepper adding complexity.

Rao's Homemade 8 Star. An unusual sesame-nutty flavor with a mild balsamic-vinegar flavor.

The rest, our tasters said, would work fine on a salad, but they were nothing special. In the lowest-rated, the old standbys Kraft and Wish-Bone, the vinegar wasn't readily identifiable as balsamic. The herbs tasted dried, not fresh, and the impression was of something processed and bottled, not homemade.