Robin Goldstein on the Economics of Wine

Robin Goldstein

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.
Robin recently started a really excellent blog called Blind Taste: A Critical Review of Food, Drinks, Culture, and Cognition.
In his most recent post, he asks why in Sweden, but virtually nowhere else, all wine stores are organized by price. (The answer clearly has something to do with the fact that the government has a monopoly on retail wine sales in Sweden.)
Earlier, he blogged about abuses on the part of information intermediaries in the wine industry and how most drinkers prefer cheap wines to expensive ones.
Going forward, we’ll be cross-posting Robin’s Freakonomics-relevant blog entries here on the blog.