This paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to analyze the treatment effect of a hail weather shock in a specific Swiss wine-growing region. We exploit a natural experiment from Switzerland's Three Lakes wine region in 2013 and examine its impact on the country's retail market. We find statistically significant (1%-level) effects of –22.8% and +2.8% for the volume and price of wine consumed, respectively. These effects can be interpreted as average treatment effects, which is the difference in outcomes between treatment and control groups using a pre-post shock study methodology. Several robustness checks confirm the statistical significance of the estimated effects and the initial assumptions.

A proposal to reform the United Kingdom's excise duty on alcohol is under consideration during 2022. The proposal would change the tax base from volume of product to volume of alcohol, which would see a fall in the tax on sparkling wine (by about one-fifth), a rise in the tax on fortified wines of 18% alcohol by volume (ABV) (by about one-sixth), and table wines with more (less) than 11.5% ABV would become dearer (cheaper). With taxes on most beers unchanged and taxes on spirits lowered slightly, the pattern of UK wine consumption and imports would alter considerably. This article draws on a global model of national alcoholic beverage markets to estimate the likely bilateral trade effects of this proposed reform to UK excise duties. It compares them with the trade effects of the United Kingdom's first two bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs), following the post-Brexit EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, which allows Australian and New Zealand vignerons tariff-free access to the UK wine market. Those two FTAs are estimated to cause the United Kingdom to import far more wine than is lost by the proposed changes in UK excise duties.

Wine investment returns can come from overall market trends or price increases with age. Because of the short wine price histories available, market and maturation effects are difficult to separate. Consequently, researchers often obtain dramatically different estimates of investment returns. We find that data sample bias may be the hidden cause of the disparate estimates. In wine auction data, the sample bias refers to a shift in the distribution of which wines are traded as a function of their age. Such sample bias in panel data sampled across many different wine labels can distort the estimation of price increases versus age and consequently impact the estimation of market trends. This analysis shows that segmenting the analysis such that the data panels contain wine labels with similar trading characteristics can lead to a more stable estimation.

The analysis here looks at data from Bordeaux, Italy, Australia, and California. An Age-Period-Cohort (APC) analysis is applied to data panels from each region. Then the data in each region is segmented by a measure of popularity in order to reduce sampling bias. Data thus segmented is then re-analyzed to demonstrate the difference in estimating price appreciation lifecycles and market trends.

We use data from Wine Spectator on 266,301 bottles from 12 countries sold in the United States to investigate the link between the score awarded by the guide and the price charged. The link between quality and price is positive, in line with the literature. In a deeper inspection, however, hedonic regressions show that the price premium attached to higher quality is significant only for “superstar” wines with more than 90 points (on a 50–100 scale), while prices of wines between 50 and 90 points are not statistically different from each other. Furthermore, an analysis performed through normal heteroskedastic and quantile regression models shows that the dispersion of quality-adjusted prices is described by an asymmetric U-shaped function of the score; that is, products with the lowest and highest quality have the highest residual standard deviation. Pursuing excellence is a risky strategy; the average price is significantly higher only for wines that achieve top scores, and the price premium becomes more volatile.

The outcome of the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris, a blind wine tasting of ten wines by nine French judges, brought American wines to the forefront of the wine business. A Californian wine, the 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars S.L.V. Cabernet Sauvignon, was declared the winner, surpassing four highly prized French wines (Château Mouton-Rothschild 1970, Château Montrose 1970, Château Haut-Brion 1970, and Château Léoville Las Cases 1971). We collect ratings from experts for (almost) all vintages of the same ten wines over the years 1968–2021 and find that the Stag's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon is far from being first. We conclude that either the 1973 vintage was overrated by the experts who tasted it in 1976, or 1973 was merely an outlier in this winery.