This paper analyzes the impact of annual weather fluctuations on the total output of wine and on the share of output of different wine-quality categories in Germany, using a set of wine data from all thirteen German wine regions and daily weather data taken from regional weather stations. The empirical analysis suggests that rising average temperatures have a significantly positive impact on the total output of wine as well as on the output shares of wine in higher-quality categories. The number of freezing days appears to be detrimental to overall production; precipitation during the growing season impairs higher-quality wines in particular. (JEL Classifications: Q21, Q13)

Data on U.S. state-level beer shipments from 1970 to 2007 provided by The Beer Institute are used to estimate pooled time-series models of annual consumption regressed on economic and demographic variables, using the common correlated effects (CCE) estimators to control for unobserved common effects and to allow for heterogeneous responses across units. Beer is found to be a procyclical good, varying negatively with the state unemployment rate. Previous findings for the negative effect of excise taxes on consumption are supported, though the estimated elasticities are smaller than those reported in earlier research. Demographics have a significant and material effect on consumption, with larger shares of young adults in the population implying greater consumption of beer per capita. (JEL Classification: D12, C23)

Agricultural cooperatives’ economic performance and efficiency today have great economic and social relevance. Consistent with the recent literature, this article examines wine cooperatives and compares them with wine investor-owned firms, studying their innovation capabilities, Miles and Snow strategies, and performance. A survey was conducted in all the wineries in Spain, with 339 responses. The interactions between the independent variables and the dependent variable were analyzed using the logit regression model. The study points out that cooperatives do not have fewer innovation capabilities, nor are they more inefficient, than investor-owned firms, although the factors that modulate their economic performance are different. (JEL Classifications: L66, M10, P13, Q13)

I am an economist, appearing on this panel as an individual at the request of FTC staff. I own a small vineyard in Napa Valley, California, have sold grapes to large and small wineries, and am familiar with the positions taken by many of the people in the wine industry regarding the opportunities and limitations surrounding direct sales of wine to consumers. My intention, however, is to speak here as an advocate for consumers rather than as an advocate for the wine business. My work as a professional economist concentrates primarily on consumer behavior, with applications in marketing, health, and the environment. I do not have a specialty in the economics of the wine industry. I am the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and have served as President of the Econometrics Society and as vice-president of the American Economics Association. In 2000, I won the Nobel Prize in Economics for my work on consumer choice behavior.

In common with most economists, I believe that consumers benefit from free markets operated with the minimum government regulation required for consumer protection. The history of government regulation of markets is littered with examples of restrictions, ostensibly adopted on behalf of consumers, that instead protect concentrated economic interests at the consumers' expense. The restrictions on direct purchase of premium wines and their interstate shipment that have been adopted by a number of States are, I believe, another example of abuse of the regulatory process to protect concentrated economic interests, going far beyond the minimum regulations needed to maintain the integrity of State taxation and to protect minor consumers.

We use rich IRI household- and individual-level data sets to examine the relationships between heart disease and type 2 diabetes with alcohol consumption. We control for a wide variety of potential confounders, including diet quality and lifestyle choices. Beer has long been studied in related literature to ambiguous outcomes. We explore the role of beer consumption in detail by separating craft beer from macrobeer and imported beer. The results indicate that most alcohol types could have protective effects against heart disease and diabetes, with the strongest effects occurring for craft beer and wine. Treating beer as a single, homogenous category in health studies likely leads to measurement error. (JEL Classifications: D12, I12, R20, L66, P36)

For centuries West Africans have made wines from palm sap, and hard liquor (“gin”) from palm wine. This essay describes the role of palm wine in West African society, attempts to regulate its production and consumption since colonial times, the basics of the production process, and the appearance, bouquet and flavor of unpasteurized palm wine as it ages through its useful life of a day or two. (JEL Classification: L66, L51,118)

Wine investment returns can come from overall market trends or price increases with age. Because of the short wine price histories available, market and maturation effects are difficult to separate. Consequently, researchers often obtain dramatically different estimates of investment returns. We find that data sample bias may be the hidden cause of the disparate estimates. In wine auction data, the sample bias refers to a shift in the distribution of which wines are traded as a function of their age. Such sample bias in panel data sampled across many different wine labels can distort the estimation of price increases versus age and consequently impact the estimation of market trends. This analysis shows that segmenting the analysis such that the data panels contain wine labels with similar trading characteristics can lead to a more stable estimation.

The analysis here looks at data from Bordeaux, Italy, Australia, and California. An Age-Period-Cohort (APC) analysis is applied to data panels from each region. Then the data in each region is segmented by a measure of popularity in order to reduce sampling bias. Data thus segmented is then re-analyzed to demonstrate the difference in estimating price appreciation lifecycles and market trends.

Student's exacting theory of errors, both random and real, marked a significant advance over ambiguous reports of plant life and fermentation asserted by chemists from Priestley and Lavoisier down to Pasteur and Johannsen, working at the Carlsberg Laboratory. One reason seems to be that William Sealy Gosset (1876–1937) aka “Student” – he of Student's t-table and test of statistical significance – rejected artificial rules about sample size, experimental design, and the level of significance, and took instead an economic approach to the logic of decisions made under uncertainty. In his job as Apprentice Brewer, Head Experimental Brewer, and finally Head Brewer of Guinness, Student produced small samples of experimental barley, malt, and hops, seeking guidance for industrial quality control and maximum expected profit at the large scale brewery. In the process Student invented or inspired half of modern statistics. This article draws on original archival evidence, shedding light on several core yet neglected aspects of Student's methods, that is, Guinnessometrics, not discussed by Ronald A. Fisher (1890–1962). The focus is on Student's small sample, economic approach to real error minimization, particularly in field and laboratory experiments he conducted on barley and malt, 1904 to 1937. Balanced designs of experiments, he found, are more efficient than random and have higher power to detect large and real treatment differences in a series of repeated and independent experiments. Student's world-class achievement poses a challenge to every science. Should statistical methods – such as the choice of sample size, experimental design, and level of significance – follow the purpose of the experiment, rather than the other way around? (JEL classification codes: C10, C90, C93, L66)

The increasing industrialization of the wine supply chain is often associated with a greater vertical coordination. Our paper shows that a spot market institutional arrangement like brokerage can still be a relevant coordination mechanism to mitigate the contractual hazards due to quality problems. Indeed, a broker can be viewed as an expert that can help the merchant to monitor the grower's wine quality process. More precisely, if the merchant cannot credibly monitor the wine making process, it is Pareto improving to delegate this task to a broker. (JEL Classification: D82, L80, M12)

In this study, we estimate a cross-sectional hedonic price function for Port wines in order to determine the price influence of several Port wine characteristics. Drawing on a large sample of more than 14,000 sales from the biggest Port wine firms we find that market prices can be explained by objective characteristics such as age, type of Port and type of brand appearing on the bottle label and subjective characteristics such as firm reputation. The Port type is the main price determinant. (JEL Classification: C21, Q11)

This paper analyzes the nonlinear relationship between the advertising investment and reputation of collective brand members in an experience goods industry, as well as the moderating role of their market share within the collective brand. The central assumption is that the quality reputation of collective brand members has a positive effect on their advertising investment until a reputation threshold is reached, after which the effect on advertising investment becomes negative. This change in the slope is explained by the information sets (firm reputation and collective reputation) used by consumers to reduce uncertainty, which leads to a weaker motivation for the firm to invest in advertising. In addition, scale economies of advertising mean that the market share of collective brand members negatively moderates the curvilinear relationship between quality reputation and advertising investment. The results for a sample of 176 companies in a Spanish experience goods industry (i.e., winemaking) between 2004 and 2014 show an inverted U-shaped relationship between the advertising investment and reputation of collective brand members. The results also show that market share negatively moderates this curvilinear relationship. (JEL Classifications: M31, M37, Q13)

Previous work has quantitatively analyzed expert wine descriptions to identify some so-called “expensive” and “cheap” words that are indicative of a wine's price. This paper revisits that work. In particular, I examine whether words previously identified as expensive and cheap ones are still indicative of a wine's price when using the same methods and a different, larger dataset. My findings mostly confirm previous conclusions, although many directions for further research into expensive and cheap wine words remain open. (JEL Classifications: D83, L66)

As for all traded products, aggregated wine imports build on numerous trades at the firm level. To ensure consumers access to a variety of wines with different qualities, importers need to connect to different wine exporters. Some of these relationships will last for a long time, while the duration of others may be short. In this article, we employ transaction-level data to analyze the duration of trade relationships in wine imports to Norway from 2004 to 2014. We find that most relationships are short-lived, as more than 75% of trade relationships end after less than two years. Furthermore, we find that higher-quality wines, as indicated by the import price, increase trade duration. Deeper firm-to-firm trade relationships for more exclusive wines are likely due to higher search costs for high-quality products. The results also show that the size of the initial trade between the partners, or degree of commitment, is a positive determinant for persistent relationships. (JEL Classifications: C41, F14, Q27)

Issues with the Cordorcet method used in the subject paper to aggregate rankings are presented. These arise because critical information contained in each voter's ranking is ignored. The mathematically superior Borda Count, which uses the complete information provided by each voter, is used to aggregate the rankings and the results are compared.

The price of wine is a key topic among market participants interested in valuing their stock, including dealers and restaurants, and consumers who may be interested in optimizing their purchases. A closely related issue, revaluation is the need to regularly update the value of a stock. This need is especially acute in the growing industry of wine as an investment. In this case, fair-value measurement is compulsory by law. We briefly review methods available to funds and introduce a new quantitative method aimed at achieving compliance with IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standard) 13 for fair valuation. Using auction data on 26,640 lots, we apply this method to compute the current fair value of a basket of 232 different wines. (JEL Classifications: C14, C43, Z11)

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.

Weather derivatives are a relatively new form of financial security, providing firms with the ability to hedge the impact of weather related risks to their activities. Participants in the energy industry have employed standardized temperature contracts trading on organized exchanges since 1999, and the availability and use of non-standardized contracts designed for specialized weather related risks is growing dramatically. The primary goal of this paper is to consider the potential design and use of a weather contract to hedge the risks faced in viticulture as measured by bioclimatic indices. Specifically we examine the Winkler and Huglin bioclimatic indices over a 43 year period for the Niagara region of Ontario, Canada's largest wine producing region, and identify a mixed jump diffusion stochastic process for cumulative growing season index values. We then employ Monte Carlo simulation to derive a range of benchmark prices for a “short condor” contract employing the Huglin index as the underlying variable. The results show that valuable hedging opportunities can be provided by such contracts. (JEL Classification: G13, G32, Q14, Q51, Q54)

Vintage goods are a unique set of goods that accrue value over time. Unlike producers for many other vintage goods, Scottish distilleries often mature their stocks to different ages and sell a product line that varies significantly in quality. This article develops a theoretical model to examine this maturation strategy and identify market conditions under which a distillery would produce multiple ages of whisky. An empirical analysis of distilleries’ product lines confirms results from the model and highlights the determinants of variety and substitutability between brands. (JEL Classifications: D43, L13, L66)

Wines are usually evaluated by wine experts and enthusiasts who give numeric ratings as well as text reviews. While most wine classification studies have been based on conventional statistical models using numeric variables, there has been very limited work on implementing neural network models using wine reviews. In this paper, we apply neural network models (CNN, BiLSTM, and BERT) to extract useful information from wine reviews and classify wines according to different rating classes. Using a large collection of wine reviews from Wine Spectator, the study shows that BERT, a neural network framework recently developed by Google, has the best performance. In the two-class classification (90–100 and 80–89), BERT achieves an accuracy of 89.12%, followed by BiLSTM (88.69%) and CNN (88.02%). In the four-class classification (95–100, 90–94, 85–89, and 80–84), BERT yields an 81.57% accuracy, while the other two produce an 80% accuracy. The neural network models in the paper are independent of domain knowledge and thus can be easily extended to other kinds of text analysis. Expanding the limited work on wine text review classification studies, these models are up-to-date and provide valuable additions to wine data analysis. (JEL Classifications: C45, C88, D83)

A vast body of literature exists on estimating hedonic price functions, which relate the price of wine to its attributes. Some existing literature has employed producer-specific variables such as quantity sold and producer reputation in hedonic functions to potentially capture supply influences on prices. This practice is inconsistent with the original Rosen (1974) hedonic theoretic foundation. To overcome this deficiency, we extend the literature by using the Rosen two-stage approach, employing data from multi-markets for similar wines to estimate inverse supply functions. The application to Australian produced wines sold in different countries demonstrates the importance of a wine's quality and age as attributes in inverse supply functions. Results imply the additional costs of producing better quality and older wines are increased as both quality and age are increased. Estimates also suggest that lower marginal costs for attributes are associated with a smaller producer size and older more established producers. (JEL Classifications: C21, Q11)