Have you heard? Judging wine with another scale.

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 on page 34 especially helpful.

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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 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 ...