The All-Important QPR

Posted 01/30/2008 at 10:17 AM by Ben

What's the one thing that's more important than the score of a wine or its price? Lately, it's something called the "QPR," which stands for Quality-Price-Ratio.

Unlike the scores awarded to wines on the typical 100 points scale used by major wine publications, the QPR doesn't tell you which wine is the best in absolute terms. It tells you which delivers the most bang for the buck. The QPR doesn't have anything like the mathematical precision of the hundred point reading scale. It's more of an emotional outburst along the lines of "you won't believe how good this thing is for eleven bucks."

You won't find much discussion of QPR in mainstream wine publications nowadays for the simple reason that they have become the victims of their own success. As soon as one of them gives a wine a rave review, the price zooms up or the wine disappears entirely from the market. Anyone who has visited a wine shop with an article clipped from the newspaper or wine publication knows how frustrating this experience can be.

Where you will find a lot of discussion of the QPR is on wine oriented internet message boards. The wine lovers who post on these boards are very clubby. When they find a great wine for the money, the first thing they do is to post a message touting the "great QPR" wine they just discovered, often at their local shop. Some of the posts are very informative, with detailed tasting notes on why the QPR ratio is so high, with specific prices and where to buy information.

The great thing with the message boards is that even the highest QPR wines almost never sell out instantaneously. Though closely read, the message boards are not widely read. While they have hundreds, and in some cases thousands of readers, they don't yet have anything close to the clout of major wine publications, which enjoy large subscriber bases and which are followed intensely by retailers and by the wine trade. After a rave review on a message board, you can almost always find the high QPR wine you are looking for at the same low price posted on the site.

The wines generating the high QPR buzz right now seem to fall into a few basic categories. For white wines, Alsace Riesling seems to be drawing the most raves, followed closely by Austria's Gruner Veltliner. For reds, California Zinfandel comes in for lots of QPR praise for its big fruit and structure delivered at reasonable prices, as does Australian Shiraz, Portuguese red grape blends from the Douro, as well as French Cotes-du-Rhones.

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