The creation of new sub-divisions within Oregon's Willamette Valley American Viticultural Area (AVA) may indicate a desire on the part of well-established wineries to “split” or separate their social groupings from those with lesser qualifications. Once their social clusters have been differentiated, we theorize that these wineries would be able to capitalize on their newly developed distinctiveness and collect larger regional reputation premiums. Based on 2,221 Wine Spectator–rated pinot noirs from between 1984 and 2008, regression analyses demonstrate that regional reputation premiums have significantly increased with the creation of sub-AVAs and that the price-quality ratio gap between sub-AVAs and the rest of Willamette has widened. (JEL Classifications: D22, Q12, L14)

With increasing globalisation and interactions between cultures, countries are converging in many ways, including in their consumption patterns. The extent to which this has been the case in alcohol consumption has been the subject of previous studies, but those studies have been limited in scope to a specific region or group of high-income countries or to just one or two types of alcohol. The present study updates earlier findings, covers all countries of the world since 1961, and introduces two new summary indicators to capture additional dimensions of the extent of convergence in total alcohol consumption and in its mix of beverages. It also distinguishes countries according to whether their alcoholic focus was on wine, beer, or spirits in the early 1960s as well as their geographic regions and their real per-capita incomes. For recent years, we add expenditure data and compare alcohol with soft drink retail expenditure, and we show the difference it makes when unrecorded alcohol volumes are included as part of total alcohol consumption. The final section summarizes our findings and suggests that further research could provide new demand elasticity estimates and use econometrics to explain the varying extents of convergence over time, space, and beverage type. (JEL Classifications: D12, L66, N10)

A substantial oenological literature exists on opinions of experts and neophytes as they relate to opinions about the quality of wines (Ashenfelter and Quandt, 1998; Cicchetti, 2004; Lindley, 2006). These opinions can be contrasted with factual binary questions about wine: Is it oaked? Does it contain sulfites? Is it filtered? Is the grape varietal Cabernet Sauvignon or Cabernet Franc? Syrah or Grenache? Pinot Noir or Gamay? Such factual binary issues are examined within the broader context of the various measures of factual judgment: Overall Accuracy (OA), Sensitivity (Se), Specificity (Sp), Predicted Positive Accuracy (PPA), and Predicted Negative Accuracy (PNA). The resulting biostatistical methodology derives from biobehavioral diagnostic research investigations. The purpose of this report is to apply this methodology to the discipline of oenology to compare wine judgments with wine facts. Using hypothetical examples, wine judges’ classifications of wines as oaked or unoaked were analyzed for their degree of accuracy. The results show that OA is a poor measure of the accuracy of binary judgments relative to Se, Sp, PPA, or PNA. The biostatistics of the problem could have wide-ranging applications in the design of future oenological research investigations, and in scientific research more broadly. (JEL Classifications: C1, L15, Q13)

The United Kingdom has accounted for a major share of the world's wine imports for centuries, and wine accounts for more than one-third of U.K. alcohol consumption. It is therefore not surprising that suppliers of those imports and U.K. wine consumers, producers, traders, distributors, and retailers are focusing on what the United Kingdom's planned withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit) might mean for them. In this paper, a model of the world's wine markets is used to project those markets to 2025 without, and then with, the occurrence of Brexit. The Brexit scenarios involve adjustment not just to U.K. and EU27 (the countries remaining in the European Union) bilateral tariffs but also to assumed changes to the United Kingdom's income growth and currency. The relative importance of each of these three components of the initial shock are reported, as are impacts on bilateral wine-trade values and volumes for still and sparkling wines. The results suggest that the impact outside the United Kingdom will be minor compared with other developments in the world's wine markets. Inside the United Kingdom, however, the effect of Brexit on incomes and the British pound are likely to have nontrivial initial impacts on the domestic wine market and to be far more consequential than the direct impact of changes in bilateral tariffs. (JEL Classifications: F15, F14, F13)

This paper shows how the hedonic approach to vineyard site selection can be used in the adaptation of vineyard land to climate change, natural disasters or other exogenous events. The basic idea is that, if the relation between weather and grape quality is known for each grape type in existing growing areas, then it is possible to predict the quality of grapes that would be produced in other locations, or in the same location with a changed climate. This permits the optimization of grape type selection for a location and also provides an indication of the value that a particular planting should produce. The relation of grape quality to the weather is provided for several well-known viticultural areas, including Burgundy, Bordeaux, Rioja, and the Piedmont. An application of the method to a new vineyard area in the Czech Republic following the demise of Communism is used to demonstrate the method. (JEL Classifications: O21, Q16, Q18, Q54)

The California Grape Crush Report (Crush Report) is an authoritative source of information on production and returns per ton by variety of wine grapes that includes summaries of quantities produced and estimates of the average prices and value of wine grapes crushed in California. The data provided in the Crush Report are used to calculate the total value of wine grape production as reported in the annual Agricultural Statistics reports published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and in major industry publications. We use the differences among crush districts in the shares of production crushed to growers’ accounts to show that the current mechanism of calculating average statewide returns per ton understates the true total value of the crush by 14 to 20 percent. We show that a more accurate estimate of the total value and average price can be obtained if the prices of the wine grapes that are sold are used to infer the prices of wine grapes that are not sold before computing the weighted averages. (JEL Classifications: Q20, Q11, Q13, Q19)

The establishment of quality assurance systems is an important development in the wine sector, particularly so for new and emerging wine regions. Focusing on the Canadian wine industry, this article examines the determinants of a winery's decision to adopt Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA) certification for wines. The analysis also examines whether wineries seek VQA certification for higher-priced wines or whether VQA certification leads to higher wine prices. To examine the certification decision, a probit model is applied to a detailed data set of Canadian wines sold in Ontario over the period 2007–2012. Wines from wineries that supply large volumes of wines (more than 1,000 cases) are more likely to have VQA certification, as well as ice wines and wines from specific regions. A Hausman specification test for endogeneity suggests that VQA certification leads to higher wine prices and not the other way around. (JEL Classifications: D22, L15, L66, Q13)

The inability of many wine judges to achieve perfect consistency by assigning the same rating to the same wine in a blind tasting is well established. Results for four wine tastings that include blind replicates are examined in this article. Although perfection is rare, the probability distributions of those results show that wine judges do tend to assign closer ratings to replicates than is likely due to chance alone. Approximately one-third of judges assign ratings that are within one rank of perfect consistency, and two-thirds assign ratings within two ranks of perfect consistency. This finding is sensitive to judges’ capabilities, the mechanics of the tasting protocol, and the extent to which the replicate is different from other wines in the tasting. Much wine-related research to date takes judges’ individual ratings as deterministic, yet these results show that those ratings are stochastic. These results yield a probability distribution that may guide future research concerning the uses and economic implications of wine ratings. (JEL Classifications: A10, C10, C00, C12, D12)

This paper explores the nonlinearities of the bivariate distribution of Bordeaux en primeur, or wine futures, prices and Parker “barrel ratings” for the period of 2004 through 2010. In particular, copula-function methodology is introduced and employed to examine the nature of the bivariate distribution. Our results show a significant nonlinear relationship between Parker ratings and wine prices, characterized by significant positive tail dependence and higher correlation between high ratings and high prices. Marginal distributions for Parker ratings and wine prices are then identified and Monte Carlo simulation is employed to operationalize the relationship for risk-management purposes. (JEL Classifications: C19, G13, L66)

More than forty published works show that women and men differ in their taste preferences for sweet, salt, sour, bitter, fruit, and other flavors. Despite those differences, dozens of state fair and other wine competitions determine winners' ribbons, medals, scores, and ranks by pooling the opinions of female and male judges. This article examines twenty-three blind wine tastings during which female and male judges scored more than nine hundred wines. Two-sample t-test results show that the gender-specific distributions of scores do have similar means and standard deviations. Exact p-values for two-sample chi-square tests show that the distributions of men's and women's scores are not significantly different, and exact p-values for likelihood ratio tests of Plackett-Luce model results show that the genders' preference orders are not significantly different. The correlation coefficient between women's and men's scores is weakly positive in 90 percent of the tastings. On that evidence, indications that the genders prefer different wines are difficult to detect. If such differences do exist, as the nonwine literature implies, the results of this analysis show that those differences are small compared to non-gender-related idiosyncratic differences between individuals and random expressions of preference. The potential for accept-a-false-null-hypothesis Type II error when pooling female and male judges' wine-related opinions appears to be small. (JEL Classifications: A10, C10, C00, C12, D12)

Judges confer various awards on wines entered in dozens of wine competitions each year. This article employs data on blind replicates to show that those awards are based on one instance of stochastic ratings assigned by wine judges; awards based on the expected values of those stochastic ratings would be different. This article recognizes the stochastic nature of ratings and builds on the work of many others to propose and test a conditional-probability model that yields maximum-likelihood estimates of judges’ latent consensus, idiosyncratic, and random assignments of scores to wines. The exact p-value for a likelihood test of the null hypothesis that the model's results are random is less than 0.001. Applying the notion of conditional probability may lead to better methods of assigning awards to entries in wine competitions and of assessing the capabilities of wine judges. (JEL Classifications: A10, C10, C00, C12, D12)

We measure the effects of consumer-perceived regional brand equity on future intentions toward regional wine purchases and winery visits for U.S.-based North Carolina (NC) wines. Visitor data were collected at 23 regional wineries, including demographics, motives, and perceptions of and intentions toward NC wines. SPSS™ and SmartPLS™ were employed in analyzing the model presented. Knowledge and regional wine brand equity influence wine consumer motives, which in turn affect intentions. Product-centered motives were more important than experience motives for visiting regional wineries. (JEL Classifications: L66, L83, M31)

This paper analyzes the determinants of Cognac brandy exports using a unique database on Cognac shipments to more than 140 destinations between 1996 and 2013. We use this database to construct descriptive statistics concerning the evolution of Cognac exports during this period. We also construct a database of protectionist policies that affect worldwide Cognac exports. We analyze the determinants of Cognac exports and base our empirical strategy on Heckman's (1979) procedure. We estimate successively the impact of geographical, demand and policy factors on the extensive margin of trade and the intensive margin of trade. We also control for the possibility of an endogeneity bias on the probability of trade. We show that i) as with other luxury products, the elasticity of Cognac exports to distance is negative, significant, and relatively small, while the elasticity to gross domestic product (GDP) is positive, significant, and relatively large; and ii) average customs duties do not have a significant impact on the intensive margin but significantly and positively affect the probability of trade. We discuss this last result and correct the endogeneity bias using tax revenues of importing countries in percentage of GDP as an instrument. (JEL Classifications: F10, F14)

This article explores the question of what distinguishes novices from experts in wine evaluation. Is it experts’ superior sensory abilities related to taste and smell, their superior cognitive abilities related to knowledge and memory, or a combination of both—and if a combination, which of the two dimensions of expertise, sensory or cognitive, seems to be more important? I address these issues by considering what has been learned in the past 30+ years from research concerning the sensory and cognitive dimensions of expertise in wine evaluation. The research examines expert/novice differences at both the chemical component level (detecting, discriminating among, and describing wine-relevant chemical components) and the holistic level (hedonic evaluation of wine as an integrated manifestation of its components). (JEL Classification: C93)

In the Old-World vineyards of Europe, a key concept that plays an important role in the production and appreciation of wines is terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We examine whether terroir matters in the New-World wines produced in California's Napa and Sonoma Counties by conducting a hedonic price analysis of vineyard sales over the period 1991 to 2007 to determine the relative effects on vineyard sales prices of designated appellations versus biophysical site attributes commonly associated with terroir, such as slope, aspect, elevation, and climate. Because vineyards that are sold are not necessarily representative of the universe of vineyards, we employ Heckman's two-stage econometric approach to control for possible sample-selection bias. We find that intrinsic site attributes and designated appellations influence vineyard prices, although our results are stronger and more consistent with regard to the influence of appellations. This finding indicates that terroir matters economically, even if the designated appellations have relatively less connection in reality with terroir. (JEL Classifications: C2, Q11)

In an attempt to expand the understanding of auction-price dynamics for fine wines, an age-period-cohort (APC) algorithm is applied to a database of 1.5 million auction results to quantify key drivers of these price dynamics. APC algorithms are designed to separate price appreciation with the age of the wine from overall wine-market conditions as well as to adjust for the unique value of specific vintages. In this context, the APC modeling provides a kind of Hedonic modeling, with specific controls regarding specification errors.

The analysis was segmented by Château Lafite Rothschild, Bordeaux excluding Lafite, and Burgundy so that we could test specific events related to Château Lafite Rothschild. The results show price dynamics versus the ages of the wines and allow for the measurement of long-term price-appreciation potential. Environment functions versus auction dates quantify the “Lafite Bubble” and suggest past correlation to Chinese stock-market indices. An analysis of wine ratings versus price quantifies their nonlinear relationship. An analysis across nine auction houses shows a significant price spread for similar wines. (JEL Classifications: C23, D44, G11, G12, Q11)

This paper examines the branding and marketing techniques used to develop the British champagne market in the nineteenth century. It draws upon the archives of the major French champagne houses and the extensive collection of price lists and marketing material in the scattered archives of W. & A. Gilbey, the dominant wine distributor in nineteenth-century Britain, to focus on the period from 1850 to the early 1900s. This period saw the creation of a powerful marketing template centered on a group of premium brands that endured for well over a century and influenced champagne marketing worldwide. Contemporary commentators saw a “cult” of famous brands, which disadvantaged consumers and merchants. Looking back at this period through the lens of a century of marketing history, we can clearly see a different picture: one of astute marketing (although that term was not then in use) that exploited selective distribution and created the concept of vintage-dated wine (what we would today call “limited-edition” product lines), making the champagne houses and their agents early exponents of Jean-Noël Kapferer's twenty-first-century “anti-laws” of luxury marketing. (JEL Classification: M3)