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The complexity in determining the quality of a credence good like wine increases due to the lack of mandatory ingredient labeling. This has generated a significant information asymmetry in the wine market, leading consumers to delegate their purchase decisions to expert rankings and wine guides. This paper explores whether expert assessments reduce the information asymmetry caused by the absence of ingredient labeling in the wine market.

By employing analysis of variance (ANOVA) in a sample of 304 wines included in the Wine Guide of the Spanish Consumers Organization (OCU), this paper assesses the extent to which expert assessments based on sensory evaluations converge with the objective cues provided by laboratory analysis in wine quality evaluations.

Results reveal a mismatch between expert assessments and laboratory analyses. Chemical aspects such as SO₂ levels or volatile acidity, sensorial factors such as intensity and persistence, and extrinsic variables such as the region of origin or wine type play an important role in the quality ranking of wines.

These findings call for the inclusion of objective intrinsic cues in expert sensory assessments to provide consumers reliable information about wines and to resolve the apparent dissonances in wine quality assessments.

Through the use of both sight and blind‐based quality metrics, the purpose of this paper is to ascertain the extent to which the sighted appreciation of a wine's intrinsic merit is confounded by extrinsic cues such as price and region of origin.

Using a database of sighted and blind tastings of three red South African wines (Cabernet, Merlot and Shiraz) over the period 1993‐2001, a series of multiple linear regression models is developed to explain sighted quality ratings.

The meta‐model, with an adjusted R² of 31 per cent, indicates three statistically significant explicatory factors, namely price, region, and intrinsic quality. The price cue alone explains 84 per cent of sighted quality assessments; the combined effect of both the region and price cue explains 95 per cent. This finding suggests that when quality is measured from a sighted perspective, area becomes a significant explicator, along with price. It is only once the cues of region and price have been factored into the meta‐model that intrinsic merit becomes relevant, and here, only to an extremely limited extent (5 per cent). The lack of correspondence between sighted and blind tasting scores, suggests that for sighted judgements – extrinsic cues appear to be masking the wine's intrinsic merit.

For the first time, blind and sighted tasting results are collated into one database and statistically interrogated. The findings show how we are deleteriously distracted by the apparent efficacy of extrinsic cues.

Positioning via quality is key for German wineries. The aim of the study was to explore reputational variables (collective and firm reputation) the study as well as limits of reputational effects.

A multi-dimensional approach, taking a supplier perspective, accessing multiple sources and evaluating Germany serves to explore exogenous factors on reputation. Descriptive and regression analyses examine individual and collective reputational effects for jury grades as proxy for quality and price as the dependent variables.

For collective reputation, region and cooperative memberships strongly matter, whereby region can be a competitive disadvantage and membership shows superior impact. Being a private but managed winery and belonging to a closed quality circle maximizes quality reputation. Strategic grouping has a distinctive effect, not size. Germany specificities and illustration to the obstacles of free-ridership are delivered.

Strategic management (including location) help to create a reputational profile. Growth should not be motivated by reputation. Different strategies for the wine guides to build reputation can be pursued, but conquering the top league is a challenge, especially in case of negative collective reputation.

For academia, the value of the study consists mainly in the discovery of the dominance of membership in a quality circle and its impact on collective reputation, and the creative multi-dimensional and multi-source approach. Also, cross-guide analysis is new. Practitioners can tailor a specific strategy vis-Ã -vis guides on the basis of the created transparency.

In the wine industry, maintaining superior quality standards is crucial to meet the expectations of both producers and consumers. Traditional approaches to assessing wine quality involve labor-intensive processes and rely on the expertise of connoisseurs proficient in identifying taste profiles and key quality factors. In this research, we introduce an innovative and efficient approach centered on the analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) signals using an electronic nose, thereby empowering nonexperts to accurately assess wine quality.

To devise an optimal algorithm for this purpose, we conducted four computational experiments, culminating in the development of a specialized deep learning network. This network seamlessly integrates 1D-convolutional and long-short-term memory layers, tailor-made for the intricate task at hand. Rigorous validation ensued, employing a leave-one-out cross-validation methodology to scrutinize the efficacy of our design.

The outcomes of these e-demonstrates were subjected to meticulous evaluation and analysis, which unequivocally demonstrate that our proposed architecture consistently attains promising recognition accuracies, ranging impressively from 87.8% to an astonishing 99.41%. All this is achieved within a remarkably brief timeframe of a mere 4 seconds. These compelling findings have far-reaching implications, promising to revolutionize the assessment and tracking of wine quality, ultimately affording substantial benefits to the wine industry and all its stakeholders, with a particular focus on the critical aspect of VOCs signal analysis.

This research has not been published anywhere else.

The paper seeks to examine Chinese consumers' wine‐purchasing behaviour and, more especially, the importance of country of origin (COO) effects in the evaluation and assessment of wine quality and as it relates to decision making for wine purchases.

The data for this study were collected in 2004 through an interviewer‐administered, structured questionnaire targeted at randomly selected wine buyers in the ChangNing district of Shanghai (China). Chinese consumers tend to purchase wine primarily for sensorial reasons, consuming it on social occasions. Wine has never acquired the connotations of being merely a thirst‐quenching drink as it did in some European countries. They are also attracted to wine for its health benefits.

It was found that Chinese consumers are more likely to use extrinsic cues than intrinsic cues to evaluate wine quality. Thus, COO information is a significantly more important cue than price for Chinese consumers as a quality cue. However, there appears to be no significant difference in the importance of COO and brand in this regard. Wine is a complex product – small differences in any one of a huge range of variables, from the weather, through the grape, the production method, the storage and even the bottling can affect quality. As might be expected in a market that is relatively under‐developed and which has a smaller experience of wine drinking than some other parts of the world, Chinese consumers pay much more attention to COO when they purchase wine for special occasions, where their choice is exposed to the judgment of others. By contrast, when purchasing wine for their own private consumption, COO assumes a lesser importance.

This research can significantly help wine marketers to develop more effective positioning strategies in China. It will also help in the development of pricing and promotional decisions.

Proceeding from studies that, at a general level, identify the extrinsic price cue as a mediator between a wine's perceived and intrinsic merit, the authors aim to report on a tasting‐room experiment conducted to determine the impact of the price cue on sighted ratings across categories of gender, age, and relative experience.

A total of 73 subjects assessed seven merlot wines, first blind and then sighted. During the sighted tasting, the only available cue‐information was the price per bottle. The seven price points ranged from the cheap (R25) to the expensive (R160).

Across all segmentations, the authors' analysis of sighted scores revealed the marked extent to which price effects demean the intrinsic merit of a wine. Older, more experienced and female strata appear to respond the most to price information; their respective model price effects are shown to increase by 57, 33 and 24 percent relative to their base comparators.

These findings challenge the dogma that unbiased sighted assessments are best conducted by self‐proclaimed wine experts who are older and more experienced; and suggest alternately, and perhaps heretically, that such assessments would be better conducted by younger, less experienced, non‐experts.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of wine closure types on the quality perception of wine consumers in a traditional wine market, combined with the willingness to pay for red and white wines in bottles closed with screw caps compared with that for wines in bottles with a cork closure.

An online experiment with 436 Austrian wine consumers was conducted in a two-by-two between-groups design. To assess the quality of Austrian red and white wine, quality indicators such as origin, grape variety, awards, the content of residual sugar, vintage, geographical indication, ageing potential, organic certification, vineyard designation and brand (producer) have been applied. Furthermore, different involvement levels as well as willingness to pay were taken into consideration.

Contrary to earlier findings, results confirm that Austrian consumers do not generally perceive wines (both red and white) in a screw cap bottle to be lower or different in quality from those in a cork-closed bottle. However, consumers expect red and white wines in bottles with a cork closure to be higher in price than wines in bottles with a screw cap. Among established quality indicators, the present analysis shows that price is the strongest cue for quality when it comes to wines and indicates that wines in bottles closed with corks and bearing a higher price tag are considered to be of higher quality.

This research comes with limitations, such as the absence of sensory differences. Moreover, the research design is based exclusively on the description of wines and a limited set of quality indicators and does not involve the actual tasting of wines.

Outcomes suggest that in the strategic positioning of wines, the difference in wine consumers’ quality perceptions between wine bottles with screw caps and cork closures plays a smaller role than anticipated. Findings are relevant for practitioners, particularly in old-world wine markets where cork is still seen as the closure of choice for higher-quality wines.

The results of this survey contribute to understanding consumers of an established old-world wine market and their attitudes towards alternative bottle closure types such as screw caps. It adds new insights to the research stream of the quality perception of wines.

This paper aims to mitigate the subjective nature of wine rating by introducing statistical and optimization tools for analysis, providing a unique approach not found in existing literature.

The research uses an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, k-means, to cluster wines based on their chemical characteristics, followed by the application of the PROMETHEE II multicriteria decision-making model to rank the wines based on their sensorial characteristics and selling price. Lastly, a linear programming model is used to optimize the selection of wines under different scenarios and constraints.

The study presents a method to rank wines based on both chemical and sensorial characteristics, providing a more comprehensive assessment than traditional subjective ratings. Clustering wines based on their characteristics and ranking them according to sensorial characteristics provides the user/consumer with meaningful information to be used in an optimization model for wine selection.

The proposed framework has practical implications for wine enthusiasts, makers, tasters and retailers, offering a systematic approach to ranking and selecting/recommending wines based on both objective and subjective criteria. This approach can influence pricing, consumption and marketing strategies within the wine industry, leading to more informed and precise decision-making.

The research introduces a novel framework that combines machine learning, decision-making models and linear programming for wine ranking and selection, addressing the limitations of subjective ratings and providing a more objective approach.

Given the growing supply of wines and the large number of new consumers with purchasing power but lacking knowledge of the subtleties of high-quality wines, expert opinions are used for consumers as proxies for quality. This study aims to determine the determinants of prices in top-quality wine market. The authors also seek to estimate the role for country of origin, grape, producing region and winery in prices. And, finally, the authors try to show how countries, regions and wineries can help increase their position in international rankings.

The authors try to answer: What factors explain the price of top-quality wines (defined as best rated in a standardized ranking)? To some extent, in the hands of producers influence prices, which imply long-term decisions or large investments in land and marketing. Other variables that consumer value does affect prices. The authors try also to detect undervalued or overvalued wines, grapes, regions, wineries or producer countries. The authors estimate an econometric model of hedonic prices using a 14-year sample of the Wine Spectator’s 100 top-rated wines for the American market between 2003 and 2016, totaling 1,400 observations. The sample is a great cross-section because each wine is unique.

The authors’ contribution is twofold: the determination of the price explanatory values and the identification and attribution of price differences by country, grape, region and winery. Also, the authors detected grapes, countries, regions and wineries which are overvalued or undervalued with respect to the average prediction of the model.

The findings are useful to understand the role of price explanatory variables, as well as for making policy and managerial decisions. From the model, collective or managerial actions can be derived to increase particular wines’ positions in international rankings. The proxy for “quality” in the study is not the only possible definition.

In some cases, managerial choices could be conditioned by the policies or history. There is some room for collective action and public policies to improve regions’ and countries’ reputation.

There are clear synergies for policies that can raise the prestige of countries and regions and their spillovers on the brand name reputation of individual wineries.

The results, policy and managerial implications are of interest for business, countries interested in improving their position in international rankings and for consumers to make more informed decisions.

Given the lack of consensus among wine experts, this paper aims to examine whether this implies they make systematic mistakes or is an expression of their idiosyncratic preferences.

Grade equations are estimated for five famous wine-experts and a panel of 62 Bordeaux fine wines over the period 2003-2011. The appellation of origin is considered a measure of the typical taste of the wines. The authors control for objective factors, thanks to weather variables and the ranking of each wine.

Ratings vary among experts, such that some statistically significantly favour wines produced in specific areas, indicating their taste preferences. Thus, preferences matter in expert ratings and would seem to suggest a continental variance. The finding explains the lack of consensus in this opinion market.

The lack of consensus among wine experts should not necessarily be viewed as market inefficiency. If consumers find the “right expert” reflecting their own tastes, as in the case of cultural goods, they may not necessarily experience a welfare loss due to expert opinion heterogeneity.

This paper contributes to renewing the debate on expert accuracy, considering wine as a cultural good and introducing preferences into the analysis. The authors develop the concept according to which existing differences in the personal tastes of the experts can facilitate consumer search.