The premise of a new book is that if you hide the label, people will rate wine according to taste appeal and frequently tasters prefer cheaper wines to the more expensive ones.

The author of "The Wine Trials," Robin Goldstein, editor of the Fearless Critic series of restaurant guides, created a rigorous test using 507 tasters and 560 wines to prove his theory. He assembled a team of professionals in economics, statistics and psychology to review the results and scientifically interpret the data. The blind tasters were volunteers from various geographical areas and for the most part, had little professional tasting experience. They tasted the wines in flights of six. In order to test the reviewers abilities, some of those flights contained "control wines." That is, the same wine was poured into two glasses. If the reviewer ranked the identical wines far apart, therefore showing a lack of tasting ability or concentration, his scores were given less weight. Those who rated the control wines close together got weight added to their rankings.

In this way the test was confronting, in the words of Mr. Goldstein, "the problem that some wine tasters are more sensitive than others to differences between wines."

To assure that even bottles covered in brown paper bags didn't reveal any price clues, screw-cap bottled wines were decanted into normal bottles, as were funny-shaped bottles, so that tasters had no way to judge a wine by anything other than its taste.

The scoring sheets were simple. Instead of the 100-point scale professional tasters use, the wine trials used a simple scale of four choices: bad, OK, good, great. Tasters checked one of those four for each question:

1. How do you find the wine?

2. How do you find the aromas?

3. How do you find the taste?

For aromas and intensity the boxes were: faint, not very intense, intense and very intense.

For the finish, the answers were: very short, short, medium and long.

The wines chosen for the trial were primarily mass-market wines commonly available in the United States. After tabulating the blind tasting scores, the editors tasted the top-scoring wines (blind, naturally) and chose the 100 winning wines before they had been removed from their brown bag covers. The wines were then organized into 11 categories of red and white, old world and new world, light and heavy, rose, sparkling and sweet.

The results might surprise you. The strongest showings for old world wine were from France and the Iberian peninsula, while the United States was the shining light for new world wines.

The 100 wines under $15 that beat $50 to $150 bottles are listed in the book. I was happy to see that some of them are wines that have been mentioned in the Tastings columns as great values. Of the 100 wines, 33 are readily available in our wine and spirit shops and 26 are available by special order with minimums of six or 12 bottles.

Of the available wines, most are priced slightly higher than quoted in the book; however, there are a few that are less, including:

• Nobilo Sauvignon Bland, New Zealand, quoted at $14; PLCB, $12.99.

• Grand Pacific Starliner, a sweet white, United States, quoted at $12; PLCB, $5.99 (Chairman's Selection).

It would be interesting and helpful to see a list of the $50 to $150 wines used in the tasting but the reader never learns what those were.

Robin Goldstein, many of his editors and some of the volunteer tasters are credentialed tasters. The book admits that experts and everyday wine drinkers have different tastes in wine and that those with trained palates had a preference for the more expensive wines presented in this tasting.

The $15 wines were those that the everyday wine drinker rated the highest. Mr. Goldstein has given wine consumers clear evidence that there is only a small correlation between price and pleasure.