My talk at the International Food Blogger Conference in Seattle, “Recent Advances in Bullshit Reduction,” along with my panel session and discussion/debate with Robert Schroeder of the Federal Trade Commission and Foodista.com CEO Barnaby Dorfman about the new FTC guide to the disclosure of freebies and financial relationships in blog reviews, will be broadcast live on UStream at 3pm Pacific time. was scheduled for streaming video, but the video had technical problems and dropped out in the middle of my panel session, so for those who are interested, I’ve posted the PowerPoint presentation (with images downsampled) here. If you’re interested, you can also check out the original Osteria L’Intrepido post, my followup to Wine Spectator’s response, and a few other related entries on my blog.

Britain’s Sun recently reported that supermarket giant Tesco sold two bottles of counterfeit Louis Jadot Pouilly-Fuissé, distributed by Hatch Mansfield, to a customer named Danny McGowan of Clacton, Essex, who described the fake bottle as having a label that “looked photocopied.” Apparently, the bottle was on sale for £5, down from a usual £14.49. (As of this writing, the Pouilly-Fuissé was on the price list at the Tesco website for £12.99.)

The Sun article, which was sent my way by the illustrious wine-counterfeiting scholar/economist Günter Schamel (whose work I’ve previously discussed here), has the amusing title “You Plonkers” and an equally amusing photo of a nonplussed McGowan.

The most unusual thing about this story is that while has been much discussion of counterfeit wine in the high-end rare and fine wine market—Jefferson bottles and first-growth Bordeaux and such—there hasn’t been nearly as much talk about counterfeiting in the low-to-midrange wine market.

In that market, the trick might be a lot easier to get away with, for at least three reasons: first of all, (more…)

In response to yesterday’s post about censorship on the FIFA.com “Have Your Say” discussion board after the USA’s third goal against Slovenia—which was controversially nullified by referee Koman Coulibaly for reasons that remain unclear—commenter bdr on my blog has observed that FIFA is also now widely suppressing video of the disallowed goal under the guise of copyright enforcement (although the video is still easy to find on youtube). Any readers with direct evidence of this copyright enforcement effort, please chime in. Commenter Sam, meanwhile, points out that the disallowed goal is not even included in FIFA’s own highlight reel of the match (and I have confirmed this): “their plan is to just act like it never happened.”

About five hours after the end of yesterday’s match, FIFA.com, perhaps in response to pressure online, began allowing a limited number of comments onto the “Have Your Say” discussion board that referenced the disallowed goal. The first such comment allowed was from Deutschnuk, on June 18 at 21:49. In the 24 hours or so since then, by my count, seven other comments, not including replies, have been posted that are critical of the call (by sp0rtsfan8, bknutz, T-Rixx, stinson87, LAUREN2010, MarcS420, and jacob163).

To counter these, FIFA.com has also posted (as of this writing) seven comments arguing that the call was justified, often by suggesting that the USA side was playing rough (from algeroid7, Stipe24, Brisaca, roedl22, j0000nz, and two from SVNFTW). One comment has also been posted that discusses the call but considers both sides. From reading the board, in other words, you’d assume that soccer fans were more or less split on the question of whether Coulibaly made a bad call.

The reason that this distribution seems utterly unrelated to the distribution of opinion amongst soccer fans, bloggers, and commentators across the rest of cyberspace is that there still seems to be massive comment suppression happening on the “Have Your Say” board.

The primary evidence for this suppression (more…)

Here’s the first of Seamus’ weeklong series of blog articles about The Beer Trials for the Powell’s website. In the article, he discusses a phenomenon that’s familiar to my experience as well:  “conversations about how I could possibly have given famous and best-selling products poor ratings.” It is a basic human instinct, and (for those of us who like to argue, anyway) a great one, to find the first rating that doesn’t comport with your experience and use that as a jumping-off point for debate.

We could answer merely that under blind tasting conditions, the panel didn’t like this beer, or that the beer was boring or flawed. But that would be the boring, flawed answer. All the fun lies in the more substantive defense of each of these ratings and the dialogue that ensues—a dialogue that could well lead to new blind tastings and have a material effect on future editions. What exactly should we be searching for in an ideal European pale lager? Supremely refreshing bitterness, or balanced hop character and greater complexity? (Seamus and I debated this one a lot; the answer, I think, might be connected to how many beers you plan to drink.) That’s why, as Seamus has said, we also really hope you look past the ratings and read the text of the reviews.

It is the more interesting conversation about what constitutes a “good” or “bad” beer, about what it even is to rate beer, and ultimately about the basic philosophical problem of intersubjectivity—that we’re hoping to stimulate. That’s also part of why we chose not just to review the cult beers, but also the everyday beers that are most available around the country. We wanted parts of the book to be familiar to anyone who had ever tasted beer; we wanted to include benchmarks, points of reference, for everyone.

I was happy to see this review of The Beer Trials by Rob Rutledge discuss this engagement with mainstream beers. Rutledge writes: “along with Chimay Blue, they actually DO rate Natural Light! And Bud Light, (more…)

Here’s a sneak preview of The Beer Trials, which I co-authored with Seamus Campbell. The preview (in PDF format) includes a press release, the preface, our list of beer ratings, and a few reviews from the book.

The book, due out on April 15 from Fearless Critic Media (distributed by Workman Publishing), rates and reviews 250 of the world’s most prominent beers (craft brews, macro-lagers, and everything in between), based on blind tastings by a panel of brewers and experts in the beer mecca of Portland, Oregon—Seamus’ hometown. We also include a broad and (hopefully) accessible reference guide to the world’s major beer styles, flavors, and regions.

The collaboration was, I must admit, a bit lopsided: Seamus (who is a brewer and one of the world’s 96 Certified Cicerones) did the lion’s share of the work. I contributed the “Trials” concept (building on the ideas set forth in The Wine Trials) and co-wrote the first few chapters, which discuss the effects of behavioral marketing, perceptual bias, and the placebo effect on the beer industry.

In Portland, Seamus and I also conducted a beer experiment together in which we tested people’s ability (or, um, lack thereof) to discriminate (more…)

In wake of some of the latest chatter about The Wine Trials 2010 (this one from Joe Briand, wine buyer for New Orleans’ excellent Link Restaurant Group, e.g. Cochon, Herbsaint, with a response from Wine Spectator executive editor Thomas Matthews), I thought it was time for a quick clarification of first principles here.

People have sometimes (often, maybe) misinterpreted The Wine Trials (and The Wine Trials 2010) as making the claim that no expensive wines are worth the money, or that cheap wine is generally “better” than expensive wine. In fact, I make neither one of those claims in the book.

Rather, my basic points are these:

(1) Evidence has shown that most everyday wine drinkers (not wine professionals) don’t prefer more expensive wines to cheaper wines in blind tastings. This is separate from the question of whether the properties of expensive wines are aesthetically superior in the minds of experts.

(2) Many (but certainly not all) expensive wines, such as the luxury brands from LVMH—which are advertised much like the group’s TAG Heuer watches, De Beers diamonds, Guerlain perfume, or Louis Vuitton handbags—are overpriced because such a large portion of their cost base is spent on marketing. This doesn’t just go for superpremium wines like LVMH’s Château d’Yquem, Krug, and Dom Pérignon; it also goes for brands like Cloudy Bay, a straightforward New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc whose price—without any apparent change in the production method—rose from about $15 per bottle to about $30 per bottle after LVMH acquired the brand in 2003 and began marketing Cloudy Bay as a luxury product.  To me, when the consumer dollar is going more toward advertising than toward materials or production, it’s a paradigm case of overpricing. It bothers me that the mainstream wine media doesn’t take brands to task for this. (more…)

We may disagree about our favorite artists and musicians, but it’s relatively easy to agree that a particular color is blue, or that a particular note is C-sharp. They’re described by wavelengths and frequencies along a clearly defined spectrum. That’s why the technologies of visual and auditory reproduction—photo, video, audio—work so well, relatively speaking.

Worth a thousand words?

With taste and smell—the so-called “chemical” senses, which are more complex (humans have about 400 different types of olfactory receptors) and less well understood than the others, we don’t have the luxury of those points of reference. That’s why we so often resort to loose analogies—“tastes like chicken”—and it’s also why reproducing tastes and smells is so difficult (grape soda doesn’t taste much like grapes, and nobody’s yet synthesized a bottle of 1945 Pétrus—an activity that would surely yield tremendous profit).

To challenge this barrier, we resort to analogy. Coffee tastes like nuts and chocolate; Sauvignon Blanc smells like grapefruit and cat pee. In a Sauternes, you might sense the brine of the first green olive you tasted in Italy; in a Pedro Ximénez sherry, the viscous maple syrup that your grandmother once drizzled on your pancakes.

But how carefully are we really choosing these adjectives and analogies? (more…)

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…)