When are High Wine Prices Justified?
In wake of some of the latest chatter about The Wine Trials 2010 (this one from Joe Briand, wine buyer for New Orleans’s excellent Link Restaurant Group, e.g. Cochon, Herbsaint, with a response from Wine Spectator executive editor Thomas Matthews), I thought it was time for a quick clarification of first principles here. Read More »
Would You Like Wine in Your Doggy-Bag?
Texas allows you to transport open but covered bottles of wine in your car. Even when there are only two of us at dinner, rather than buying a glass of wine for each, we buy the whole bottle and take home what’s left. Read More »
Chianti as Collateral
Italian banks may soon accept fine wines and dry-cured hams as collateral on loans. Read More »
Loneliness or Cheap Wine
I’m alone in Europe, living in an apartment and cooking for myself. I bought a bottle of decent red wine for the remarkably low price of $2.99 and am consuming about one-fourth of it with each dinner (instead of the one-fifth or one-sixth of a bottle I would drink with each dinner at home).
Have I substituted toward wine, moving down the demand curve because the price is lower than at home? Or am I drinking more because I am alone and miss my wife? has my demand curve for wine merely shifted out due to my solitary lifestyle? Read More »
Do Taste and Smell Adjectives Signal Value, or Do They Create It?
Two papers at last month’s meeting of the American Association of Wine Economists in Reims (this is my second of two articles about the conference) investigated this question with respect to the wine industry, which is, if not a microcosm of all consumer-products industries, at least an increasingly apt caricature of them. While creative adjectivism has long characterized the wine world, the practice in other taste industries — chocolaty coffee, metallic fish, grassy honey, peaty whiskey — is now ascendant. Read More »
Robin Goldstein on the Economics of Wine
We are delighted to welcome Robin Goldstein to our family of Freakonomics blog contributors.
We’ve blogged in the past about Robin’s research involving blind wine tastings, as well as his research on whether people can tell the difference between pate and dog food. Read More »
Révolte des Vignerons
Levitt‘s cheap wine advocacy may have met its match. To protest the falling price of wine, a French group calling itself the Regional Union for Viticultural Action has attacked French supermarkets in the past. Now it has adopted a more supply-side approach: the wine militants recently broke into a cooperative in the south of France, […] Read More »
Am I Drinking Because of the Price or the Election?
We saw this sign in the window of a local wine store offering a 10 percent discount on selected brands until 9 p.m. on election night. The owner had noticed that people tend to buy wine on Election Day — either to celebrate or to nurse their wounded egos if their candidate loses. Election parties […] Read More »
