Although potentially useful for financially hedging systemic weather-related risks, weather contracts/derivatives (also referred to as parametric insurance) have not seen wide adoption in agriculture outside of applications in developing countries, frequently supported by governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). A significant impediment is the lack of financial firms willing to stand ready to sell weather derivatives to individual agricultural producers in the over-the-counter market who, due to the localized nature of weather, face idiosyncratic weather-related risks. In particular, the administrative and reinsurance costs of supplying relatively small contracts with specific terms to many different producers are often prohibitive. The current study considers the potential use of weather derivatives in hedging the aggregate yield/revenues of viticulture producers represented by an industry association located in the province of Ontario, Canada. We examine the sensitivity of aggregate industry yields to several relevant weather-related risks employing copula function analysis. We then consider the potential of a weather derivative in hedging the financial risk associated with cold winter temperatures, which pose the greatest risk to aggregate vinifera yields. The issue of attributing costs and payouts to individual association members remains unresolved, and several alternatives are suggested.

We propose to establish wine rankings using scores that depend on the differences between favorable and unfavorable opinions about each wine, according to the Borda rule. Unlike alternative approaches and specifications, this method is well-defined even if the panelists’ quality relations are not required to exhibit demanding properties such as transitivity or acyclicity. As an illustration, we apply the method to rank wines assessed by different experts and compare the resulting ranking with that obtained according to Condorcet's method of majority voting.

Consumer choice of differentiated products, such as wine, depends on the composition of the choice set consumers are choosing from. However, choice sets are often situationally defined through wine-tasting lists or displayed wines in a particular tasting and sales environment. In this paper, we use an experiment to explicitly modify the saliency of wine options available outside the tasting room choice set and the amount of sensory information available about the wines before wine tasting. We explicitly test whether consumer regret and fear of missing out on alternative options or consumer search costs are more likely to drive behavior around large choice sets. We find that increasing the saliency of outside options decreases one's propensity to taste the wines available for tasting and purchase immediately, while changing search costs through sensory descriptions does not affect tasting behavior. This provides support for the anticipated regret and fear of missing out motivations for behavior around large wine-tasting lists.

Is it possible to exploit cognitive biases so that a non-professional taster prefers one wine to several other absolutely identical wines? To address this question, three complementary experiments were carried out. Each time, five wines were tasted blind in a tasting laboratory by 24 to 34 tasters. Converging evidence from the experiments shows that participants were not capable of identifying that some of the wines they were tasting were absolutely identical. Moreover, the results show that by providing information about the wines’ ratings, prices, or reputation, tasters’ expectations can be modified, and, as a result, their evaluations of the wines can be altered. Specifically, we show that it is possible to modify the ranking between different wines and to get tasters to prefer a wine over other absolutely identical wines. Finally, a surprising finding was that experienced tasters express stronger opinions and adapt their evaluations more strongly after being given manipulative information on the wines they taste.

China has been one of the most important sources of growth in global wine demand this century, accounting for 7% of the world's wine consumption and imports by 2017, or four times its 2005 shares. But China's per capita wine consumption peaked in 2012, has fallen every year since 2017, and in 2022 was one-third of its peak, and its imports have more than halved since 2017. Certainly, the COVID-19 disruption and associated slowdown in China's income growth would account for some of that. However, the fall in China's alcohol consumption began three years earlier, and between 2019 and 2022, the fall was considerably larger for wine (47%) than for spirits (17%) and beer (3%). Thus, wine's share of alcohol consumption in China fell by two-fifths over those three years. The article speculates on the reasons behind the dramatic downturn in this globally important market and finishes by imagining future trends and drawing implications for wine-exporting countries.