This is the story of the Princeton Wine Group, a group whose membership has been relatively constant for almost 40 years. This group has enjoyed 244 blind tastings involving 1,708 different wines. A statistical analysis was performed at each tasting examining whether participants ranked the quality of wines similarly and whether the preferences of the group were correlated with several variables including professional wine ratings and the prices of the wine. The article concludes with a discussion of lessons learned from a lifetime of wine tastings.

We shed light on assessing product quality in blind tastings and their potential (gender) biases. We study how phonetic traits of grape varieties suggest product attributes in the context of professional reviews. This study aims to close this research gap and analyze how product variety and phonetic name traits affect expert ratings. We obtained data on 18,609 wines and their ratings from Wine Enthusiast Magazine between 1997 and 2016, yielding a sample of 31,058 observations. We suppose that the gender of the taster needs to be considered to understand what affects tastings and ratings, as women and men might be attracted differently to masculine or feminine names. This study shows that masculine names receive higher evaluations than feminine ones. This phonetic gender gap is driven by lower ratings for white wines by female reviewers and lower ratings for red wines by male reviewers. In addition, white wines are rated lower overall by both men and women.

This paper investigates the growth and clustering of craft breweries in New Jersey. We compiled a historical dataset from 1995 to 2020 that allows us to measure the degree of geographic clustering among craft breweries in New Jersey. The number of craft breweries in New Jersey grew 491% from 2012 to 2020 (from 22 to 130 craft breweries). An impetus for this growth was that New Jersey enacted legislation in 2012 that made opening and operating a craft brewery in the state more economically viable. Our analysis finds that craft breweries in New Jersey are clustering in specific parts of the state and that this is likely due to co-location benefits such as building a culture of craft beer that drives innovation, knowledge sharing, customer sharing, and a thicker labor market. While distinct craft beer clusters have formed in New Jersey, we find there is still significant opportunity for growth. Our analysis confirms this using data on planned craft brewery openings to measure changes in the size and density of clusters and where, in New Jersey, new clusters are likely to form.

Exploiting the fact that hypertension is diagnosed when a person’s blood pressure reading exceeds a medically specified threshold (90 mmHg for diastolic blood pressure or 140 mmHg for systolic blood pressure), this study estimates the effect of a first-ever hypertension diagnosis on Chinese adults’ alcohol consumption using a two-dimensional regression discontinuity design. Analyzing data on 10,787 adults from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, our estimation reveals that hypertension diagnoses based on diastolic blood pressure readings exert a number of desirable effects. Hypertensive adults’ drinking frequency and the incidence of excessive drinking among them were reduced by 1.2 times/week and 17.9 percentage points, respectively, about three years after the diagnosis. Meanwhile, their beer and Chinese spirits (Baijiu) intakes were reduced by 518.6 ml/week and 194.8 ml/week, respectively. Interestingly, we also found modest evidence that hypertension diagnoses based on diastolic blood pressure readings increase Chinese adults’ wine intake, suggesting a substitution pattern upon hypertension diagnoses. In contrast, based on systolic blood pressure readings, no significant effects of hypertension diagnoses on alcohol consumption were found.