Fine wine has a few characteristics that differentiate it from other agricultural commodities and beverages, rendering it an interesting topic for economists. Fine wine can regularly fetch bottle prices that exceed several thousand dollars. It can be stored a long time and can increase in value with age. Fine-wine quality and prices are extraordinarily sensitive to fluctuations in the weather the year in which the grapes were grown. Wine is an experience good, that is, its quality cannot be ascertained before consumption. As a result, consumers often rely on “expert opinion” regarding quality and maturation prospects. This article describes the emergence and the unparalleled rise of wine economics from the 1980s to the present and sheds light on its three main topics: finance, climate change, and the role of expert opinion. (JEL Classification: Q1, G11, Q54, L15)

This study develops thirteen criteria to detail diverging direct shipping laws of the U.S. states. It also investigates why some states have prohibitive laws by utilizing a logit regression model. Regression results provide strong support for public finance and special interest arguments: It appears that states concerned about incurring losses in tax revenues, that is, that are heavily dependent on federal aid and have low state revenues, and protecting the wholesalers and retailers that benefit from the three-tier system (at the expense of wineries and wine drinkers) are most likely to have a prohibitive law. (JEL Classification: D72, H71, Q18)

In this paper, we study firm reputation by investigating the interaction between individual reputations of Italian wineries and a large set of (possible) determinants. With respect to winery reputation, we find a positive effect for firm age and size and producer's intrinsic motivations and a negative effect for outsourcing, while horizontal differentiation, ownership status, and hiring well-known consultants play no role. Further, collective reputation and institutional regulation exert a significantly positive effect on individual reputation. (JEL Classification: L14, L15)

This paper considers the levels of reliability and consensus of wine quality judgments found in studies of experienced wine judges. Both reliability, which concerns the similarity of repeat judgments of a particular wine by the same judge, and consensus, which concerns the similarity of judgments of a particular wine across judges, are necessary requirements for expertise in wine judging. Reliability and consensus levels found in wine judging are compared to those documented by a large body of research in six other fields: medicine, clinical psychology, business, auditing, personnel management, and meteorology. In all fields, including wine judging, reliability is greater than consensus. Both reliability and consensus are, on average, substantially lower in wine judging than in other fields, although tremendous variability exists across judges in every field. Overall, little support is found for the idea that experienced wine judges should be regarded as experts. (JEL Classification: C91)

An impartial assessment of the quality of the wine produced over the years in a region (vintage quality) is an essential tool for producers, consumers, investors, and wine researchers to understand factors influencing quality and make purchasing or investing decisions. However, scoring the overall wine quality over the years does not necessarily produce a consensus of which year or years are best. Several critics, magazines, and organizations publish vintage charts that assign a score to each vintage, representing the corresponding perception of the wine quality. Often, the scores given by different institutions reveal little consensus with respect to the relative quality of the vintages.

In this work, we propose the utilization of a rank aggregation method to combine a collection of vintage charts for a region into a ranking of the vintages that represents the consensus of the input vintage charts. As a result, we obtain an impartial ranking of the vintages that represents the consensus of an arbitrary number of independent vintage charts. We illustrate the method with the scores from three wine regions.

The proposed method produces a ranking of vintage-to-vintage quality that represents an impartial consensus of a collection of independent sources, each using a different rating format, scale, or classification. Such a ranking has the potential to be useful for the research community, which needs a relative measure of wine production quality over the years. Therefore, we make publicly available a software tool that implements the method (Borges, 2011). (JEL Classification: C38, C61, C88)

This article examines the diffusion of technological innovation within the California wine industry by studying the adoption of ozone-cleaning technology. The paper compares ozone with other sanitizing systems and reviews current perspectives on innovation diffusion and adoption before describing and analyzing the results of a 2007 industry survey completed by 128 California wineries. We find that the decision to adopt ozone-cleaning technology was correlated with its economic advantages but not with either demographics of decision makers or variables indicative of a winery's ability to absorb new information. (JEL Classification: Q1, Q16, O33)