One of the most thought-provoking papers at this year’s meeting of the American Association of Wine Economics was presented by Günter Schamel, a professor at the Free University of Bolzano.

Not empty for long?

Schamel’s study, which is still in progress, has thus far looked at a data set of 260 eBay auctions of empty wine bottles. In his model, the most powerful predictive variable—explaining both the incidence of sale and the final auction price of an empty bottle—is “the price a full and presumably authentic bottle could potentially fetch in the marketplace.”

Schamel argues that this is “powerful evidence that the empty bottles might go on to be refilled. Why otherwise would someone want to pay more than 100 euros for an empty bottle of 1982 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild rated with 100 Parker points? Presumably, because it is worth a lot more once it is filled up again.”

Certainly, notwithstanding a recent incident in which a customer at a London restaurant sent back a £18,000 magnum (more…)

Sweden has one of the world’s most controlled alcohol regimes, with steep taxation, a state-controlled retail monopoly, and a 20-year-old minimum age to buy alcohol at a store (and they really card, too). The only store at which a consumer can buy wine, beer, or liquor in Sweden is Systembolaget, the state-controlled retail monopoly.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? My intuition (and that of the economists I’ve been speaking with here in Stockholm) is the latter—first and foremost, as in Quebec, it’s a major headache for wine producers, whose distribution chances hang on the (often arbitrary) whims of just one decisionmaker. Opening hours of stores are criminally short. Pricing is screwy, in part because per-unit (rather than per-krona) taxation results in cheap wine being overpriced and expensive wine underpriced. As ever, monopolies throw everybody’s incentives out of whack.

But here’s one definite consumer-oriented boon that results: in an of-the-people move, Systembolaget wine stores—that is, all wine stores in Sweden—are organized first by color, second by price. There’s the 69-kronor-(US$8.71)-and-under red wine section; there’s the 70-kronor-(US$8.84)-to-99-kronor (US$12.50) red wine section; and then there’s the 100-kronor (US$12.63)-and-up red wine section.

Although I’ve seen US wine stores with special $10-and-under sections and such, I’ve never seen an entire store organized this way. Intuitively, at least, it seems to be more aligned with consumers’ game plans as organization by region, grape, and so forth.

Why don’t non-monopoly stores organize this way?

My guess would be that profit-minded stores, for understandable reasons, don’t want to lose the chance to upsell—they want people to walk away with a wine more expensive than the one they came looking for.

Ethics scandals are politico porn. They’re also fertile ground for undeserved scapegoating. But there’s one category in which, across the board, there’s not nearly enough public stoning going on: the world of information intermediaries. On the government side, that means regulatory agencies; in the private sector, it’s the critics, the expert witnesses in capitalism’s de facto justice system.

Information intermediaries, we’re to understand, are society’s check against puffery. They make careers of trustworthiness and accountability. In society’s service, they apply rigor to the claims of corporations and analyze their standards. For this hard work, they’re rewarded by the marketplace and by the United States—sometimes handsomely, sometimes not.

Two bits of recent news bring about two otherwise disparate intermediaries, both preeminent in their niches—Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, the publication whose critical appraisals are one of the central determinants of a wine’s success or failure on the marketplace, and the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency whose critical appraisals are the primary safety check against America’s airlines—systematically abusing that authority.

Jay Miller: Disfrutando?

Parker’s is one of the few wine publications that don’t accept advertising, for which he deserves praise. And it’s certainly acceptable to take free samples of wine from producers—that’s often the only way to taste new releases before they’ve gone to market. But the recent transgressions of Jay Miller, Robert Parker’s right-hand man, are spectacular indeed. In another classic case of the traditional print media jumping on the bandwagon of a topic that had been exposed quite a bit earlier by an incisive blogger—in this case, Tyler Colman, who goes by “Dr. Vino”—Miller’s series of all-expenses-paid vacation/junkets, financed by wine producers, have finally been reported by the mainstream media in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Some of rumors about Miller’s behavior in Argentina go quite a bit further in scandalousness (more…)

Fresher wine, or just a pretty face?

I’m not sure which of the following two myths is more ridiculous: the myth that you can re-cork a half-drunk bottle of wine and keep it around for a week and have it “still be good,” or the mutually exclusive, but equally misguided, myth that you can keep wine from going bad with commercial “wine preserver” devices. The media is largely responsible for both of these myths—the first because of ignorance, and the second, perhaps, because of advertorial content and the power of suggestion.

What’s amazing is that almost nowhere in the media do I see discussed the magic solution to keeping leftover wine fresh—the solution that winemakers already know about—which I’ll discuss below. First, though, about the media myths:

Myth 1. You can re-cork wine and keep it around. I’m usually a fan of Consumer Reports, but their wine coverage has long been weak, and they got it embarrassingly wrong (and did the wine world a disservice) when they suggested that (more…)

The New Yorker’s recent profile of Fred Franzia has sparked a debate amongst the wine pundits on the question of why it’s so hard to find good American wines under $10, under $12, or even $20. I had an interesting conversation on this topic with Tyler Colman the other day. There’s a debate on the topic on Tyler’s blog, Dr. Vino, where he asks his readers to weigh in on these potential theories:

“Short-ish history of American wine with relatively few small growers, recent industry consolidation, the soil and/or climate, high land prices, producer greed/pride, the three tier distribution system, or the consumer as chump.”

Beautiful place, for a placebo

Eric Asimov at the New York Times has also recently commented on the difficulty in finding good, cheap American wines on his blog and in print. In the print article, he seems to gravitate toward the “shortish history” explanation, together with a discussion of a dominant social/consumer norm in the US wine market that leads producers to gravitate toward a single, uninteresting style (a style that I think has been promoted by many wine magazines). Asimov writes:

“In modern American wine history — post-1960 — the selection of grapes is monochromatic…In effect, then, California produces a small amount of top-flight wine along with an ocean of generic wine that seeks to imitate the top echelon, often through artifice like oak substitutes and additives. All too often, the choices are expensive cabernet or chardonnay, and imitation expensive cabernet or chardonnay.”

A similar perspective on Asimov’s blog:

“Very little wine is flawed in this day and age, now that we understand the science of winemaking and the importance of hygiene and temperature control in the mass-production of wines. But it is insipid… (more…)

Not funny at the time

Like golf, baseball still has some touchingly quaint pen-and-paper blue laws, and when Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon signed an incorrectly filled out scorecard for Sunday’s game against Cleveland, the Rays lost their designated-hitter privileges (the American League allows the DH to bat for the pitcher). As such, pitcher Andy Sonnanstine, who shouldn’t have normally had to bat at all, wound up not just having to bat, but having to bat third—the lineup spot normally reserved for the best hitter on the team.

Sonnastine did just what would be expected of a #3 hitter: he went 1-for-3, with an RBI double in the fourth inning. Tampa Bay won the game, 7-5.

Of course, 1-for-3 is hardly evidence of anything. Even AL pitchers get hits every now and then. And maybe Sonnastine also secretly happens to be a good-hitting AL pitcher (there’s insufficient but still interesting evidence of that: he’s 5-for-13—.385—in his career).

But another account (also with insufficient evidence) would be that he was made to feel like a #3 hitter on Sunday, so he performed like one. That explanation would dovetail (more…)

In Adam Gopnik’s excellent piece about Gillette razors and innovation in the New Yorker, he discusses the fact that each new generation of razors—Gillette’s latest, the Fusion, now has five blades and a “triple-A battery inside, which makes it vibrate delicately to no particular purpose, like an old electric football game” (probably the best simile I’ve read all year)—doesn’t seem to work any better than the previous one.

Am I just five times more likely to cut myself?

This Gopnik explains with what he calls the “Devil’s Theory of Innovation”: briefly, that “cutthroat…competition produces stasis,” and that “we are born to be inherently frivolous aesthetes, who like change for change’s sake.”

I am deeply sympathetic to this point of view. In fact, Gopnik’s piece reminded me of a long law-and-economics argument that I had seven or eight years ago with Yale Law professor (and erstwhile Microsoft consultant) George Priest on the same topic: Gillette’s farcical march of purported technological progress toward ever more blades. The argument happened over a lovely dinner (more…)

We’ve mainstreamed the debate over ending the prohibition on marijuana. Why is the debate over legalizing prostitution still a taboo?

Blaming a classifieds web site for the actions of an alleged murderer is almost as absurd as blaming high-school pot smokers for September 11. Nonetheless, Craigslist has decided to remove (or at least rename) the “erotic services” category of the site. This from the New York Times:

“Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, said his office had recently notified Craigslist about an impending prostitution case that involved the erotic services category.

‘Rather than work with this office to prevent further abuses, in the middle of the night, Craigslist took unilateral action which we suspect will prove to be half-baked,’ Mr. Cuomo said in a statement.”

Putting aside the obvious hypocrisy of this particular office’s crackdown on this particular brand of consensual human behavior—and putting aside the disturbing implication that our state’s top law enforcement officer does not subscribe to the principle of innocent until proven guilty—just why is prostitution illegal, anyway?

Prostitution will always be a profession, and it may always be a profession more risky than most. But in justifying the current policy, most prostitution prohibitionists make the same type of correlation-causation mistake that the drug prohibitionists make (more…)

On culinary televangelism and the Parkerization of cuisine

In the introduction to his book La Cocina al Desnudo (roughly “The Kitchen Laid Bare”), the chef Santi Santamaría writes: “one of the greatest challenges faced by today’s chefs is to avoid becoming the court jesters of the snobs and the posh.”

One of the highlights of FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, was a spirited hour-long debate on the status of Spanish cuisine between Mr. Santamaría (Santceloni, Racò de Can Fabes, EVO, Tierra; on the right end in the photo), one of Spain’s great culinary traditionalists, and José Carlos Capel (on the left end), a well-regarded food critic for El País who, generally speaking, embraces the avant-garde.

It was a debate to which Ferran Adrià, one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy (the culinary movement to which Santamaría alternately refers as “cocina de la vanguardia,” “tecnoemocional,” and “cocina del laboratorio”), was surely invited—and didn’t come.

Perhaps Mr. Adrià felt no need to defend himself. In late April 2009, his restaurant, elBulli, was named the best in the world for the fourth year in a row in the annual survey of the World’s Top 50 restaurants, by the British Restaurant Magazine, while Santamaría is absent from the list entirely. Fellow molecular gastronomy houses The Fat Duck (UK), Noma (Denmark), Mugaritz (Spain), and El Celler de Can Roca (Spain) round out the rest of the top five. (The chefs of Noma and Mugaritz studied with Adrià.)

Santamaría, without being so immodest as to suggest that (more…)

Apparently Stephen Colbert was amused by our paper investigating whether people could taste the difference between pâté and dog food.

His conclusion was pretty funny.