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Posts Tagged ‘wine’

Further Evidence That Wine Tasting Is Wildly Subjective

A few years ago, we did a podcast on whether expensive wine tastes better. There is now further evidence that the answer to that question is no — even for elite wine critics. Winemaker Robert Hodgson recently collaborated with the California State Fair wine competition on a little wine-tasting experiment:

Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual “flight” of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson’s findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine.


Wine at the Opera

At the opera last night we pre-ordered a glass of wine for the first intermission.  We paid before the opera and the glass was at the prearranged place after Act 1.  We’ve done this many times in Germany and increasingly in the U.S.  Why do the opera houses do this?

Competitive pressure is absent—they have a monopoly on drink/food at intermission.  Despite this absence, providing this opportunity raises the house’s profits.  Without the usual long wait at intermission, more customers will buy food/drink—so revenue increases.  This policy puts less pressure on workers—they don’t have to rush during intermission to serve people; in the long run this reduces the wage the opera house has to pay for equal-skilled labor—costs are reduced.  Everybody wins—and I’m surprised this policy isn’t more widespread.


Wine: Very Liquid

Wine Spectator includes a feature (subscription required) on Nicolás Catena, who received the magazine’s Distinguished Service Award for 2012.  His online bio states, “One year, Domingo [Nicolás’ father] realized that it would cost him more to harvest than to leave the fruit on the vines. He asked his twenty-two-year-old son Nicolás, a recent Ph.D. graduate in economics, what to do about such a dilemma. Nicolás advised him not to harvest.”  You don’t need a Ph.D. to see the sense of Nicolás’ advice — if price is too low to cover average variable cost, shut down.  Sadly, “Domingo could not follow his son’s advice with a clear conscience and picked anyway.”  No doubt the family vineyard lost even more money than if Domingo had listened to his son.


Do We Drink Because We're Monogamous, or Are We Monogamous Because We Drink?

Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast is called “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?” It features some research presented by the American Association of Wine Economists, whose members include Karl Storchmann, managing editor of the group’s Journal of Wine Economics.
Storchmann wrote to us the other day about an interesting working paper the AAWE has just posted: “Women or Wine? Monogamy and Alcohol,” by Mara Squicciarini and Jo Swinnen.


An Organic Discount?

For most products, an “organic” label results in a significant price premium. However, a new study finds that the opposite is true for California wines labeled as “made from organically grown grapes.”


More Income, More Choices

As we get richer, we not only substitute toward higher-quality goods-we demand more diversity in what we consume and what we do.


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.


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.


Chianti as Collateral

Italian banks may soon accept fine wines and dry-cured hams as collateral on loans.


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?


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.


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, emptying vats of wine containing . . .


Reports of Sail Freight’s Demise Have Been Mildly Exaggerated

Photo taken from Kathleen and May Levitt recently sang the praises of cheap wine. But how can wine stay cheap when oil prices keep pushing up the cost of transportation? Sailing ships might be the answer. Last Friday, a 108-year-old British sailing ship delivered 30,000 bottles of French wine to Dublin. It was the first time since the 1800’s that . . .


Keep the Cheap Wine Flowing

I blogged last week about blind wine tastings — my own casual experiments as well as some more serious academic ones. The bottom line is that in blind wine tastings, there is a zero or even slightly negative correlation between the ratings of regular people and the price of the wine they are drinking; for experts the relationship between rating . . .


Cheap Wine

I spent three years at Harvard in the Society of Fellows. I had no obligations there except to spend my Monday nights eating fancy meals in the company of some of the world’s most brilliant thinkers: Nobel Prize-winning scientist Amartya Sen, philosopher Robert Nozick, etc. Dinner was always accompanied by expensive wine from the society’s wine cellar. Photo: Rhett Redelings . . .


The Perils of Fame

Apparently, it is dangerous even to be the wife of a semi-famous economist-author. In this blog post about the difference between corked wine and screw-top wine, Levitt’s wife, Jeannette, is revealed to be not only a drinker but a cork snob: We recently had a friend over (her husband, Steve Levitt, co-wrote Freakonomics) and I noticed the strange look she . . .