We took up this very question a couple of days ago in a thread labeled "Battle of Trafalgar." It's a few steps down the topic list from this one. My reply to that topic contains about all I have to offer on the subject of good plastic sailing ship kits for newcomers. Unfortunately there aren't many of them. This is a sadly neglected segment of the hobby.
Regarding the relative quality of products from different manufacturers, I have to agree with Chuck Fan. The Heller
Victory probably is the best plastic sailing ship kit on the market, with the Heller galley
La Reale a close second. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of competition at the moment. Revell used to offer a big range of sailing ship kits, the best of which, in my opinion, were at least as good in terms of scale accuracy as anything in the Heller line. But the American Revell catalog now only contains two sailing ships. (Revell of Germany offers a few more, but all of them are extremely old and hardly represent the company's best efforts.)
The only other companies that have ever seriously competed in this area are Airfix and Imai. Most of the Airfix sailing ships are out of production - but the Airfix
Wasa is still in the catalog and can be made into a beautiful (though pretty small) model. Airfix and Heller are under the same management; the big
Victory is currently being sold under the Airfix label, but it's just a reissue of the Heller kit. The Japanese company Imai made some excellent sailing ships back in the late seventies and early eighties (its
Cutty Sark, in my opinion, is the best rendition of that ship ever), but has been out of business for a long time. Several of the smaller Imai kits have resurfaced recently under the labels the Minicraft label, and in the past couple of months several of the bigger ones (including the
Cutty Sark) have been reissued by Aoshima. Unfortunately the prices of the Aoshima kits are sky-high.
I wish Tamiya or Hasegawa
would get into the sailing ship field, but so far they haven't.