When I first received “Good, Better, Best Wines: a No-Nonsense Guide to Popular Wine,” by Carolyn Evans Hammond I fairly quickly put it aside for a slew of reasons. First and foremost, because I am dubious of guides and critics and points and experts. I used to pay a lot of attention to points and scores and, while they are a starting point and a tangible number that people understand when you speak of them, at this point, I care a lot more about other factors while judging whether to buy a wine, most of which I won’t bore you with now.

(I lied: I try to look at the big region and the micro-region, the vintage year, the winemaker and where he/she has worked before, where they learned about making wine, whether they’re biodynamic and why, the sub-region their grapes are from, the amount of handling the grapes undergo, the weather for that year, the aging capability, the alcohol content, the other wines the vineyard produces and on and on…I never pretend not to be a wine dork!)

The question of “why should I trust this person” is always a good one and as readers of our column, I hope you’re questioning us as much as we question others. What I sometimes do is try and find a critic or blogger who has similar taste to mine – I like what they like and dislike what they dislike and then go from there. But everyone’s tastes and experiences with wine are SO different, even that can run into risky territory. There are so many factors that go into wine – glassware, food, temperature of wine, decanting time, time of tasting, how many wines you’ve tasted before and especially your mood and the company. Which is a long way to say that I’m suspicious of guides and scores.

However, I pulled it out and gave it a second look when my darling Mama called me asking for help finding a under-$15 merlot that would go with her famous spaghetti sauce. Then: Score! I turned to the merlot chapter and flipped through it until I found one I thought I could recommend. The wines in the book are all available in supermarkets or smaller markets (something important since The Mama lives in Nebraska and I can’t take her wine shopping with me). And all the wines fit into four price boxes from under $4.99, $5-7.99, $8-10D.99 and $11-15.

I truly used this book in the way it was intended. The way I buy my wine is very different than most “normal” people who aren’t afflicted with the wine bug, so while I can’t see me using this for my own shopping (I’m currently obsessed with flash sales online and still paying off my Napa wines), I can definitely see the mass appeal.

It’s a great pocket-size and will definitely fit into your purse if you want to slip it into the grocery store to do your buying. The author has nice food pairing suggestions, too, that take the guess work out of dinner. Really, they make it easy.

I wasn’t crazy with the short descriptions – they seemed too similar to the winemakers’ little paragraphs – and I would prefer to know the story behind the wine but again, I’m a huge wine dork, and what I want to know about the wine won’t fit into a pocket guide.

The white elephant that I haven’t touched on yet is whether I endorse the book’s choices of good-better-best and I can’t answer that. I’m familiar with some of the wines and have enjoyed some of them and I have also poured some of the wines in the book down the drain with a grimace. I didn’t sit down and try all the wines as the authors did, which brings us back to point one.

If you have similar tastes to the author, you will likely be thankful and dependent on this cute little guide and I can truly see how it might make your life easier and your wine confidence stronger. If you’re looking for a little extra help in the wine buying corner of your life, if you only buy wine $15 and less and you do most of your wine-buying at the supermarket or local liquor store, then go buy the book. Try out some of her recommendations, see you have similar tastes and then decide how much you want to rely on it. Not a bad use of $9.32 from Amazon…About the price of the Relax Riesling in the book, which suddenly I’m interested in trying…