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Wine Competitions: Reevaluating the Gold Standard*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2018

Christopher Bitter
Christopher Bitter*
Affiliation:
Vintage Economics, 1506 N. 80th St., Seattle, WA 98103; e-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Competition medals are one of the most readily available sources of expert opinion to wine consumers, yet the “expertise” of competition judges and efficacy of medals have been questioned in the literature. This paper reevaluates the relevance of gold medals using data from ten competitions and scores from two leading wine publications. The analysis begins by exploring differences in gold medal award rates across competitions while holding wine quality constant through paired comparisons, which are found to be substantial. Next, the relevance of gold medals as indicators of wine quality is assessed, using the average scores from Wine Enthusiast and Wine Spectator as surrogates for quality. By itself, knowledge that a wine is a gold medal winner appears to have little relevance, as these wines do not score significantly higher than other medal winners. However, evidence suggests that golds from some competitions may be more relevant than others. (JEL Classifications: L15, L66)

Keywords

wine competitionswine judging agreementwine quality evaluation
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Wine Economics , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , November 2017 , pp. 395 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © American Association of Wine Economists 2018 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the anonymous referee, the editor (Karl Storchmann), and the participants of the 11th Annual AAWE Conference for their helpful suggestions that improved the paper.

References

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