Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T07:13:04.198Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Wine Competitions: Reevaluating the Gold Standard*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2018

Christopher Bitter*
Affiliation:
Vintage Economics, 1506 N. 80th St., Seattle, WA 98103; e-mail: [email protected].

Abstract

Competition medals are one of the most readily available sources of expert opinion to wine consumers, yet the “expertise” of competition judges and efficacy of medals have been questioned in the literature. This paper reevaluates the relevance of gold medals using data from ten competitions and scores from two leading wine publications. The analysis begins by exploring differences in gold medal award rates across competitions while holding wine quality constant through paired comparisons, which are found to be substantial. Next, the relevance of gold medals as indicators of wine quality is assessed, using the average scores from Wine Enthusiast and Wine Spectator as surrogates for quality. By itself, knowledge that a wine is a gold medal winner appears to have little relevance, as these wines do not score significantly higher than other medal winners. However, evidence suggests that golds from some competitions may be more relevant than others. (JEL Classifications: L15, L66)

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Association of Wine Economists 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the anonymous referee, the editor (Karl Storchmann), and the participants of the 11th Annual AAWE Conference for their helpful suggestions that improved the paper.

References

Ashton, R. H. (2011). Improving experts’ wine quality judgments: Two heads are better than one. Journal of Wine Economics, 6(2), 160178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashton, R. H. (2012). Reliability and consensus of experienced wine judges: Expertise within and between? Journal of Wine Economics, 7(1), 7087.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashton, R. H. (2013). Is there consensus among wine quality ratings of prominent critics? An empirical analysis of red Bordeaux, 2004–2010. Journal of Wine Economics, 8(2), 225234.Google Scholar
Cao, J., and Stokes, L. (2010). Evaluation of wine judge performance through three characteristics: Bias, discrimination, and variation. Journal of Wine Economics, 5(1), 132142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, R. T. (2008). How expert are “expert” wine judges? Journal of Wine Economics, 4(2), 233241.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, R. T. (2009). An analysis of the concordance among 13 U.S. wine competitions. Journal of Wine Economics, 4(1), 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar