The extremes of sexism in the wine industry

Recently, two articles appeared online that highlight the two extremes of inequality between males and females, in the wine industry. I live in a country (Sweden) that tries very hard to be as equal as possible, all the time, and it is usually rated as being very successful at this; so this issue does matter to me.

Let’s start with the good article:

Bulgaria’s wine revolution: from communist giant to indigenous champion

The article has a lot of information about the current situation in the Bulgarian wine industry. In particular, there is a whole section on “Women Leading the Revolution”. Consider this quote:

One unexpected aspect of Bulgaria’s wine renaissance is the prominence of women in professional winemaking roles. Bulgaria may be the only European country where women make up roughly half or more of all professional oenologists.

So, most of the recent (post-communist) jobs have been taken by women; more power to them! This is the way it should be.

Sadly, Eurostat reports Bulgaria as being second-last within the European Union in the assessment of “Independence of the justice system” as perceived by the general public; but presumably they can get this up to the same exemplary level.

Now let’s turn to the more depressing wine article, at the other extreme. It is particularly depressing for me, because Australia is where I grew up, and first learned to appreciate wine. The title says it all:

Sexism, harassment and inflexibility drive women out of winemaking, survey reveals

The article summary is:

Charles Sturt University [in Australia] has carried out a nationwide study into gender equity in the wine industry. The main factors contributing to women leaving the industry were identified including sexism, discrimination and a lack of flexibility ... Warning: This story contains details of sexual assault and language some readers may find distressing.

So, I won't quote any of the stories, but simply let you read the article for yourself. Instead, I will turn to something a bit better, later in the same article:

As a result of the study, a free toolkit has been released for the wine industry, providing practical steps to get businesses thinking about gender equity.

So long as they do a bit more than just think, but act as well, then this is the right direction.

 

Asides: There will be a Historic Apology to the First Nations People (sometimes known as Aboriginals) from the state government of Victoria; now the other Australian states must follow suit. The national ban on children accessing social media until they turn 16 seems to be of more doubtful effectiveness.

Effect of online notices on wine blog readership

Last week I wrote a post about The effect of newsletter sites on wine blog readership, showing that being highlighted in online news sites really does affect the readership of my wine blog. I presented example data that being listed by Wine Industry Insight does increase readership, depending on how prominently it has been listed.

Oddly enough, that particular blog post was not listed by Wine Industry Insight, at any time during the subsequent week. Subsequently, the post readership was 65, compared to the usual average of c. 1,650 readers per post (with an overall low point of a couple of hundred people).

It is therefore intriguing that the blog post that discussed the effect of news sites on blog posts does most clearly illustrate their serious effect.

The effect of newsletter sites on wine blog readership

I do not have paid subscribers for this blog, but it is still of interest to me how many readers I get for each weekly post; and so I do keep an eye out. This number varies greatly from week to week, most presumably because of the topic being addressed in that particular week. My weekly post readership has varied from a couple of hundred to nearly 23,000, but it currently has an average of c. 1,650.

However, it seems to me that the number also varies depending on how the post is addressed by those web sites that collate a daily or weekly summary of wine-related articles. For example, a particular Wine Gourd post could be highlighted by some site in any given week, in which case it may get more readers.

One daily compilation site where it is possible to highlight web posts in variable ways is Wine Industry Insight (WII). This is currently compiled on weekdays by Kara Daly, but has previously been done by Becca Yeamans and also by Kevin Merritt.

WII has three different ways to highlight any given web article in its daily list. It can be the (single) main “Today’s Top Story”, or one of at least a dozen “More Top Stories”, or one of another dozen or so “The Rest of the News”. The number of articles varies for each daily summary, as shown for the past couple of years in this graph.

The number of items in the Top Stories (Series 1) and Rest of the News (Series 2)
sections of Wine Industry Insight, from October 2023 to August 2025.

Each weekly The Wine Gourd blog post usually makes an appearance in one of that week’s WII summaries. Furthermore, the posts have appeared in all three sections. It is therefore of interest to me to find out how variable my readership is, depending on which section the posts appear in.

To this end, I have kept a track over the past couple of years. The table below lists the average number of post readers for each of the four possible WII categories (including not appearing at all).

As you can see, my average readership does indeed go up, the more highly any given post is highlighted by WII. Getting into The Rest of the News (*) increases readership by 43% compared to not making an appearance at all (—); making it into More Top Stories (**) increases readership another 29%; and being Today’s Top Story (***) increases readership another 19%.

So, this summary site does seem to make a valuable contribution to my blog readership, by choosing how highly to emphasize any given post.

The Wine & Spirits Magazine Top 100 wineries

There are many lists handed out each year, telling us about some sort of rank-order of wines and/or wineries; e.g. Drinks International magazine: The World’s Most Admired Wine Brands (What is a "most admired" wine brand?). One potential problem with such lists is that they tend to change each year (see: The Most Admired Wine Brands are very different this year). However, these sorts of lists are often fun to look at, anyway.

Each year, Wine & Spirits Magazine unveils their Top 100 Wineries of the Year (currently: Announcing the Top 100 Wineries of 2022). This is the list that I will look at here.

The list of wineries is compiled as determined by “their exceptional performance in our tastings this year”, based on “vetting thousands of producers via the magazine’s exclusive two-step blind-tasting process.” This process has been described in more detail in: How a ‘Top 100 Wineries’ list actually happens: a peek behind the scenes.

Since the wines tasted vary from year to year, and you can look at each individual list of wineries for yourselves, I will instead look here at the consistency of the wineries in the lists across several years. There is no necessary connection between these winery—years, because each list is based on the wine scores solely for that year. Nevertheless, if winery quality means anything, then the same wineries should get listed each year (provided that their wines were tasted), even if their order changes.

The first time the magazine produced a Wineries of the Year list was way back in 1987. However, let’s start by first looking at the past 9 years only — this should provide a list of [some of] the currently prominent wineries. There were 427 wineries listed in at least one of these 9 years. The number of times they were listed were:

    No. years    No. wineries
        9                2
        8                2
        7                11
        6                11
        5                15
        4                32
        3                49
        2                68
        1                237

So, only two of the wineries were listed in all nine years; this is not too good, if we are looking for consistency. The 26 top-listed wineries were as shown in this next table.

Most of these wineries come from California (8), followed by Italy (5) and Oregon (4). To me, this seems to be more than a little bit biased, geographically speaking.

If we now look at the previous 26 years, the list is quite different, as shown in this new table (below). This shows the number of times the top-listed wineries appeared (only those that appeared in at least half of the yearly lists), and compares this to the recent 9 years. As you can see, only Concha y Toro, Penfolds, and Marchesi Antinori did well in both sets of years. That is, the current Top 100 wineries are not the same as they once were; perhaps we should not really be surprised?

This means that we should now look at all 35 years, simultaneously, if we want an overview of the past 3½ decades. This is shown for the most successful wineries in the figure below. In this case, a dot means that the named winery was listed in the Top 100 in that year.

As you can see, only 9 wineries appeared in at least half of the yearly lists. Penfolds topped the score-sheet (29/35 appearances), followed by Concha y Toro (27/35). Of these top nine wineries, Penfolds, Concha y Toro, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Ridge Vineyards, Marchesi Antinori and Iron Horse did consistently quite well (across the years), whereas Boutari and Louis Jadot did well only in the early years, and Diamond Creek Vineyards did well later.

So, there you have it. These apparently are the top wineries, in the world, according to the annual wine tastings of Wine & Spirits Magazine. I have no objection to any of them being in the list; but I can think of one or two others that should be there, as well. I am sure that you can, too!

The wine industry needs to say: “Cheese” (seriously)

I have previously suggested that The wine industry is asking the wrong question, when asking how to market wine to Millennials, rather than asking what Millennials actually want to drink. This is, of course, but one perspective on the general issue that: Global wine consumption has been declining for a long time.

Naturally, there are other perspectives on the global decline of wine consumption and sales. For example, the wineRamp group has noted that “there is a demand problem that needs to be addressed”, and it thus has the explicit objective to: Grow demand for wine in the US marketplace. That is, they wish not only to slow the decline but to positively increase consumption. To this end, they have suggested that It’s time for an American Wine Marketing Board, to oversee the turn-around.

So, what does any of this have to do with the title of this blog post? Well, it is easy to criticize, but the criticism goes down a lot better if something positive is presented, as well. That is, of course, precisely what the wineRamp group is trying to do. The downside of this, unfortunately, is that the people who don’t like the proposed actions will just criticize the proposed alternatives, as well. So be it.

By way of saying something positive in this post, I am going to compare vineyards to cow pastures, of all things. These pastures have cows on them, and cows produce quite a lot of different products. That makes these pastures fundamentally different from vineyards in the wine industry, which mostly just produce grapes for making wine (wine grapes are rarely edible, for example).

The upshot is that cow farmers understand this basic principle: What you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. Consider the following pair of graphs, taken from: U.S. dairy consumption trends in nine charts. The first one shows declining consumption of milk in the USA over the past 40 years, which looks to me almost exactly like the decline in wine consumption in the same location over the same time. The second graph shows the exact opposite trend, with increasing cheese consumption. Both milk and cheese come from the same cows — indeed, the European Union has formally defined cheese as a "matured dairy product", because bureaucrats need such definitions in order to pass laws. *

You can see my point about swings and roundabouts — the cow farmers are doing okay; and, indeed, a third graph (not shown here) shows a general upward trend in “all dairy products consumption, milk-fat milk-equivalent basis, per capita”. So, these farmers can weather the ups and downs of any given milk product. My new question, then, is: what are the wine industry’s roundabouts? What is the wine industry’s equivalent of cheese?

The wineRamp suggestion is basically support for marketing (Wine, the wallflower: Industry honchos plan joint marketing push). This fits neatly into my point in this post: Remember ‘Got Milk?’ As demand shrinks, fine wine needs a USDA Marketing Order. Does it work (cf. “Where’s the Beef?” ; “The Incredible, Edible Egg”)? This marketing approach does not require diversification (eg. fresh milk plus cheese), but simply money. There are, of course, many ways to sell, these days (How Wine Access fled old media tactics and chased consumers into the subscription economy).

There are many future marketing suggestions, after all (Want to fuel your winery’s future growth? Engage women and younger consumers). This may not work, of course, since advertising itself is not always enough (TV wine ads: Black Box targets younger consumers — but still doesn’t get it right). After all, consumer preferences change continually (What wine lovers really want), and not just for wine alone (Wine needs to fit in with changing consumer meal prep.). In short (Wine’s biggest unanswered, market-killing question: Why?):

The currently stalled WineRAMP effort to create a consumer market promotion similar to “Got Milk?” is fundamentally flawed, and would be doomed to failure even if funded, because it lays out no plans for market definition, messaging or other statistically significant, actionable data on the “why” questions.

There are other possible responses to declining domestic consumption, of course. For example, the focus could be on diverse export markets (How wine businesses can prosper in an era of uncertainty):

Business as usual is no longer. For the global wine sector, the uncertainty of the 2020s is in stark contrast to the relative stability of the preceding three decades ... businesses with a broader sweep of export markets may benefit from a portfolio effect which hedges their exposure if one of those markets suddenly deteriorates because of tariffs, economic crises or war.

Another important alternative is to diversify the product itself; and this is, to me, the basic issue of this blog post. What else can the wine industry produce except wine? To use yet another metaphor: if all your eggs are in one basket, then that basket must have no holes. The reality seems to be that the wine industry has an ever-increasing hole in their only basket.

I suspect that there is no industry-wide response to this issue. To quote Rob McMillan (Turning the tables on Rob McMillan — wine industry analyst): “It’s not an easy task finding agreement in this industry.” So, individual producers will need to think about diversification. If, as has been suggested, market share is being lost to the spirits category. then make spirits, as well as wine. If young people are preferentially drinking seltzers, then make seltzers, as well as wine. You get the idea.

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* This created problems for Ricotta, of course. This has always been called a cheese, but it is not matured in any way. My wife and I once went to the Ricotta Festival, in Vizzini (Sagra della Ricotta e del Formaggio), in Sicily, and the Ricotta was literally taken straight from the cauldrons and put into our bowls.

The wine industry is asking the wrong question

We have all seen numerous reports recently, examining the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, and its effect on the wine industry. Many of the comments have been inspired by the recent report from Rob McMillan, of the Silicon Valley Bank (State of the Wine Industry Report 2022). It seems to me that many of the responses miss the point somewhat (Wine marketing strategies fail to attract millenials); and I thought that I might write about this here.

The SVB report is intended to be a bit more holistic than simply wine-focused, in that it tries to look at the big picture, of the industry as a whole (although restricted to the USA). One topic of focus is that the prime wine-drinking population of recent decades is the Baby Boomer generation, which is mostly now either in retirement or departed. The issue is that neither the following Generation X nor the subsequent Millennial generation have shown more than cursory interest in wine. If they consume alcohol, then it is likely to be mixed drinks (except maybe in Australia: Australian millennials drive wine consumption post-pandemic).

The response of the commentators has been to ask the question: how do we sell our wines to the Millennials? I contend that this is fundamentally the wrong question, asked from a wrong perspective.

• Young people are buying less wine, but the industry keeps marketing to aging Boomers
• The wine business sees a problem: Millennials aren’t drinking enough
• Has the wine industry blown it with Millennials?
• US wine market — time for a rethink

I will keep my commentary personal, but I contend that my perspective is a general one. I am a classic Baby Boomer, whose (Silent Generation) parents hardly drank wine (cheap semi-sweet sparkling stuff is all I can remember from my childhood). I started drinking wine at university, at least partly because a bottle shop (liquor store) down the road from my home started having free tastings on Thursday nights (see Some personal anecdotes). From there, I started visiting wineries whenever I was in the vicinity. I now have a small collection of wine maturing under the house, to be consumed by my wife and I.

So, my perspective is not that of an industry insider, but that of an interested consumer. I have read a lot of books, and I read the new web pages each week; and I do wonder about a lot of what I read. I cannot see much of it being of interest to Millennials. Let's take some of the points, one by one.

For example, there are endless articles about apparently esoteric topics that affect wine production: different soils and climates, different clonal selections, different cultivation and vinification. There is also, of course, The enduring mythos of wine, which reeks of snobbery and elitism (USA survey finds rules of wine are intimidating). Even worse are the articles about wine that we will never get to drink, either because we are in the wrong financial bracket or because the wine is no longer available.

Indeed, this latter point still annoys me, even after decades of drinking wine. I am happy to read an article directing my attention to some currently available good-value wines that I have not tried before. However, far too much wine writing is about wines I will never get near, for one reason or another. Why should I read such stuff? How do I identify it before I read it? We will never get people interested in wine if the entry bar is raised too high.

However, what seems worst to me is that most of the writing is nothing more than opinion; and people almost never seem to share the same opinions! Someone will write an introductory book on wine, and other people will denigrate it for over-simplifying what is obviously a deeply complex and fascinating topic. Someone will write a personal reflection, and other people will dismiss it as being out-of-date. Someone else will write a deep dive into a particular wine region, with all of the details, and other people will be totally disinterested. Is this any way to attract customers?

From here, we could consider the issue of variability in quality, which is real. Depending on how you choose your wine, it seems to be depressingly easy to end up with a bottle you are not prepared to drink, once opened. Just about everyone I know has poured a bottle of wine down the sink. However, none of them has ever poured a beer down the sink, nor a mixed drink. If you happen to be a not-yet-very wealthy Millennial, which of the three drinks are you going to prefer? They are making their own conclusion rather obvious (Four reasons why Millennials don’t have any money).

Then there is the matter of storing the stuff. The purchaser does not need somewhere to store much in the way of beer or mixed drinks, because they can be drunk immediately after purchase, with perfect satisfaction. For wine, however, even cheap wine can taste a whole lot better if we wait a while (Does bottle price have anything to do with cellaring desirability?); and many wines positively demand storage, if we are to get any sensory value for our money. This alone raises the bar for entry into the world of wine as something more than a thirst quencher.

Finally, of course, if someone does manage to jump the bar, they need to rob a bank to afford the allegedly top-rank stuff (The outrageous prices of modern high-quality wines). Well, I have, on rare occasions, tried some of these wines, and I can tell you now that not one of them impressed me even slightly, even though I have been told that this is what I should aspire to. Now, maybe this makes me an inverse wine snob, rejecting the supposedly most snobbish stuff; and maybe it makes me a sensory philistine. Either way, I am better off saving my money for the stuff that I like, which almost never gets more than 95 points, and never ever costs me either an arm or a leg, let alone both (Tasting great wines?).

So, that leaves the bottom line, which is to ask what sort of industry are we trying to attract Millennials to? It can not be the one that attracted Baby Boomers. Baby Boomers were the first post-War generation — the ones looking for a bright future after the dark days experienced by their parents. Wine became a part of that, as a luxury good that people could aspire to, and work towards. It represented just how different this new world was going to be, as newly affluent people benefited from their affluence.

This, sadly, ignores the down-side of what happened during that time. The Environment had not yet become a concern, which means that the Baby Boomers did not care for it the way they should have.

The Baby Boomers have not left a legacy that inspires much emulation. The world is a far more serious place, now, as we  try to grapple with long-term problems, not short-term ones, like a war. I have pointed out before that wine-industry data clearly high-light global warming back in the 1970s (Grape harvest dates and the evidence for global warming); but no-one cared back then. The wine industry certainly has a role to play, now, by achieving carbon neutrality, and by caring about packaging (their own, and that of others: Wine brand removes 10 million plastic bottles from the oceans).

However, that will never be enough (Why have we left it so late to deal with climate change in the wine industry?). My background in biological science tells me that reversing global warming may be a pipe dream — the best we may ever be able to do is to stop making it worse. Natural ecosystems are very robust, and they tend to move from one stable state to another, in response to any given disturbance. The new state may not be desirable for human beings, as some species become extinct while others taker over dramatically. The weather may be completely different, and stay that way for hundreds of years — so, you may have to get used to the current droughts (West megadrought worsens to driest in at least 1,200 years), and the loss of cool nights during grape ripening (Winemakers are poised to lose another vital tool to climate change). This has an obvious affect on agricultural pursuits, with desirable geographical locations for each pursuit changing dramatically. This is all "perfectly natural" in the big scheme of things; but it may take a lot of getting used to by human industries, which are all small-scale by comparison.

On top of this is the matter of health. Living a healthy lifestyle is unquestioned by Millennials. This means that any question about wine and health is of paramount importance. There are actually two issues here. One is the increasing pressure being applied to the alcohol business, particularly by the World Health Organization and by the European Union. This does not refer just to whether wine containers should have a list of ingredients (A perfect storm: Nutri-Score, alcohol and health;  Two glasses of wine enough to hit daily sugar limit) but also the extent to which it should contain health warnings (European Union lurches towards Prohibition;  Amendments made to alcohol and health recommendations in Europe). The second issue is whether we ever could work out whether wine is good for us or not (Wine and health — why is there so much argument, pro and con?). The response of parts of the alcohol industry has not been good (How can we get sober from the influence of the alcohol industry?).

None of this is meant to be scare-mongering. The world will be what it will be, and at my age I will not still be here to see it. However, my daughter will be, and she is an archetypal Millennial. She has no interest whatsoever in wine, at least partly because her parents do have one (including her step-mother). She is part of the future, and we are not (for long, anyway). The Millennials are trying to make their own future, just as the Bay Boomers did, before them.

So, the ultimate question for the wine industry is: how do we make the wine industry part of that future? What we are doing at the moment is asking a very different question: how do we make the Millennials part of the wine industry? When you swap those two questions, it is easy to see why the wine industry is having a hard time. Someone has put the cart before the horse. We do not need to get the Millennials to join us; but instead we must join them!

This means that we should stop trying to sell preordained wine to the Millennials, and start making something that they would actually choose for themselves.

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There is an old saying: The customer is always right. This is not a definition of “right”, but instead it is a definition of “customer” — if you think that someone is wrong, then they can never be your customer.

Some wine industry websites track their visitors egregiously

Much fuss is made these days about the potential invasion of privacy involved in the act of tracking visitors to websites. In many cases, the visitors are not told about the extent to which they are being tracked by any given website, least of all by the website providers themselves. Indeed, this is so bad that the European Union has legislated against it, which prevents quite a number of US websites from serving EU visitors.

Most of this tracking is allegedly done in the name of "providing a helpful customer experience", but in actual fact this requires very little tracking, if any at all. In practice, most of the tracking is done in the name of advertising — tracking the potential customers' online behavior so that they can be served carefully targeted ads. (Note: this is quite a different thing from other forms of web privacy invasion, such as data security, and leaking of personal information.)

Ad tracking borders on the unethical in many cases, and clearly passes that border in some cases. So, the obvious question is: where does the wine industry stand on this matter, in practice? (What people say, is another matter entirely!) It turns out that we can actually find this out for ourselves.

This is because the topic has been the subject of some practical research, in the sense that there are now tools for you to find out what any given website is doing when you visit it. One of the most ambitious of these is the Blacklight Privacy Inspector. The public release of this tool a few months ago did attract some media attention (eg. 87 percent of websites are tracking you. This new tool will let you run a creepiness check). The Markup company itself ran its own checks on 80,000 of the most popular sites, which provides us with some useful comparison data. One of the most unexpected outcomes was that the site owners themselves often did not know that the homepage set-up tool they had used had inserted trackers into their website (The high privacy cost of a “free” website).

The Blacklight tool checks any web address that you give it, and looks for a number of potential privacy invasions that could be occurring:
  Number of ad trackers
  Number of third-party cookies
  Tracking that evades cookie blockers
  Session recording
  Keystroke capturing
  Facebook pixel
  Google Analytics internet tracking
These are described in detail in an online article (How we built a real-time privacy inspector), and I briefly discuss them below.

So, let's name names. The table at the bottom of this post presents a somewhat arbitrary collection of five dozen wine-related websites. I have tried to include all of the usual suspects, supplemented by a few sites that I sometimes read myself. I apologize in advance to those of you who have been left out, or if anyone finds releasing this information embarrassing. My ultimate aim is to make wine-industry websites as clean as possible, by pointing out where the dirt has accumulated.

Note, also, that I have excluded online stores selling wine and accessories, which are far and away the most likely sites to be tracking you (for their own purposes). They may appear in a future post (now online as: Ad Tracking by online wine shops is variable).

The columns of the table present each of the seven Blacklight criteria, evaluated by me during this past week, for each of the named sites (one per row). The first two criteria list the number of trackers encountered, while the other five columns indicate (Y=yes) that the site was detected carrying out the named tracking activity.

I am pleased to report that 11 / 60 (18%) of the sites were not detected doing any ad tracking at all. Kudos to those one-fifth of the website owners. Note that the Wine Gourd does have one cookie, as do all Blogger sites (owned by Google), and also Facebook sites.

Potentially the most invasive activity is Keystroke Capturing, which records every single time you press a keyboard key (such as when entering your personal details in a form). There were 2 sites apparently doing this, which Blacklight reports as an average percentage across the web. It is possible that this use is (or once was) actually legitimate, as it is sometimes used for auto-completion of forms. This would need to be checked.

Session Recording keeps a record of your on-site activity, including mouse movements, clicks and page scrolling. This is sometimes ostensibly done to optimize the layout of web pages, but it can also be used for ad tracking (see Advertisers can now tell if we're paying attention). There were 4 sites doing this, which is half the Blacklight average; but why do it at all? These sites definitely do not need to be doing this.

Evading Cookie Blockers (aka Canvas Fingerprinting) is the next most egregious action. There are browser add-ons or extensions that we can use to stop cookie tracking by any website that we visit (the one I use is Privacy Badger); and when we use them we mean: Don't Track Me! There were 5 websites found to be using fingerprinting, which is a bit above average, according to Blacklight. It is possible, but unlikely, that this activity was actually an attempt to protect those sites from botnet attacks.

Next, Ad Trackers try to identify and collate information about users, and send that information back to the tracker's website, to be used for ad targeting. The average number per website, as reported by Blacklight, is 7, and the wine sites had an average of 6. So, the wine industry is no worse than elsewhere, in this regard. However, you can see in the table that several wine websites currently exceed this number massively. This occurred in all four categories of website, although the Wine Professionals were the least egregious. But why on earth does anyone need to put 20 or 30 ad trackers on their website? Sadly, we all know the answer.

The same thing applies to Third Party Cookies. These have nothing to do with the running of the website itself (which legitimately uses cookies to keep a track of things like visited pages and log-in details). Instead, these other cookies are installed on behalf of external sites, and store information on your own device, to identify you when you visit other sites with the same cookie. Blacklight says that the web average is 3 per site (often associated with the ads displayed on the pages), but the wine industry apparently thinks that a better number is 11 per site. More to the point, you can see for yourselves that quite a number of sites massively exceed even this large average — and there are not that many ads displayed on their pages, so the cookies are covert. These sites are usually the same ones that have a large number of ad trackers, as well; so, we are left in no doubt about the attitude towards site visitors by these website owners.

Next is Facebook, which is monetized by serving personalized ads (and is currently embroiled in anti-trust lawsuits — Federal government and 46 states file antitrust suit seeking to split up Facebook). To serve these ads, Facebook wants to know which websites you visit, and it finds this out by getting the website owners to tell it. Blacklight says that about 30% of sites agree to do this, and 23% of the wine industry sites also currently do so. Did you know that a quarter of the websites you visit are telling Facebook that you are there? This explains why Facebook ads seem so directly relevant to your past web activity.

Finally, we come to Google, which is also monetized by ads, and whose web behavior has resulted in fines of tens of millions of dollars, especially in the European Union (eg. Google, Amazon fined $163 million as France takes hard line on privacy). Google wants to track you across all of the web, which it does by cross-collating every bit of information it can find about you, and especially your activity. In order to succeed, it helps if the website owners tell them about your activity, which Blacklight says about 50% of sites agree to do. In the wine industry, it is about 45% of the websites. So, Google must know a lot about you all, by now.

As I noted earlier, it is possible that some the website owners fingered here do not know what their own website is doing. If they used a "free" package to set up their sites, then the tracking activity could have been installed without their knowledge. Blacklight reports that a number of site owners immediately removed the trackers when they were informed about them. It would be nice if that happened here, as well.

For the rest of you site owners, please clean up your act. A cookie or two is one thing, but the table below indicates some seriously invasive activity. If a site really does need to do this sort of thing, then it should tell us about it when we first visit the site, rather than making us find out for ourselves. Indeed, this is actually mandatory in the EU — although I doubt that too many people read all of those Cookie Consent pop-ups (they are usually quite uninformative).

In the meantime, the rest of you can all try out Blacklight, and test your favorite websites for yourselves. Some people apparently don't mind having advertisers looking over their shoulders as they browse the web. Indeed, anyone who logs into a website using their Facebook or Google credentials is actually demanding that they be tracked (in exchange for saving a few seconds, or having to remember only one set of login details). However, we should all be given the option to opt into tracking if we want to, rather than being forced to opt out.

The Judgment of Paris demonstrated nothing, statistically speaking

Way back in 1976 there was a comparative tasting of several fancy (and expensive) American and French wines, in which the US wines acquitted themselves quite well. This became known as The Judgment of Paris, a classical allusion that probably escapes most people.

The media made much of this outcome at the time, claiming that the American wines “won” some sort of contest, and should now be considered to be the best in the world, or at least the equal of the French stuff. Indeed, whole books have been written about this; and the volume of words in the media is horrendous to think of.

However, it seems to me that there is one thing missing here, and always has been. Since the quality scores assigned by each taster to each wine are available to us, we can judge for ourselves whether the scores actually show anything more than random variation. After all, the sample size was very small: 20 wines tasted by 11 people. I have already argued the case that the results are very variable in all the wrong ways, if one wishes to compare the wines of two countries (11 tasters and 20 wines, and very little consensus). Well, I have finally decided to bite the bullet, and apply some formal statistical analyses to the data — this blog is the only place likely to try this exercise!

Now, before you all jump up and down reminding everyone of the old saying that there are “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”, bear with me for a moment. That statement dates from the 1890s, long before the development of modern mathematical methods to study data involving probabilities. There are now many powerful methods for analyzing data in an objective and repeatable way, ones that generate no controversy about their outcome. Statistics is no longer whatever you want to make of it.

In the case at hand, there are several possible causes of variation in the quality scores assigned to the wines:

1. the wines come from two countries — this is what we want to examine
2. for each country, there were 10 reds and 10 whites selected out of all of the high-quality wines that could have been chosen for inclusion — the results might have been different if other wines had been chosen
3. there were only 11 people selected as tasters, out of all of the wine critics that could have been chosen — the results might have been different if other tasters had been chosen
4. these people were of different genders, and there were not equal numbers of males and females.

There are other factors that might be important, of course, but this list is all the information that we have. The point here is that we wish to study factor 1, and to do so we need to take into account the variation caused by factors 2, 3 and 4. This is what modern statistical analysis is all about — studying one source of variation if the face of variation cased by other factors. How do we do this in some objective and repeatable way?

The answer, as formalized by Ronald Fisher in the 1920s, is called Analysis of Variance. It does precisely what the name says — it tries to measure the amount of variation caused by each of the factors. If the variation for any particular factor has a strong pattern, compared to the others, then we can consider it to be an important one, and if the variation has no particular pattern then it is not important. This comparison is made with respect to the variation that is not accounted for by the specified factors.

The concept is fairly simple, but (of course) the mathematics is not. It can often be done by hand, if you are inclined to try that sort of thing, but I always use a computer program. I have used this type of analysis many times in my own research career; and I have even taught this analysis to undergraduate and postgraduate biology students. So, what happens if I apply it to the data from the Judgment of Paris?

Well, you already know the answer to that, from the title of this blog post. The formal details of the analysis are included at the bottom of the post, for those of you who might be interested in them. Here is a summary of the results:

Factor Country Wine Gender Person

F-value 1.37 5.64 0.01 3.63

Probability 0.256 0.000 0.908 0.000

Each row of the table refers to a formal statistical test of one of the four factors. The F-value (named after Fisher himself) is the result of the calculations — for purely random data this value will = 1. The probability is a measure of how likely it is that the F-value is not > 1. By convention, we might choose p < 0.05 as our criterion for concluding that a factor shows important variation.

As you can see, there is almost no variation between the two genders, in our sample, which may surprise none of you. There is some variation between the two countries, but it is not very large, and is nowhere near “statistical significance”. All of the fuss about the results is nonsense — the differences are nothing more than we would expect from random chance, 26% of the time.

This does not mean that there were no differences between the wines, because there surely were. However, the analysis indicates that these differences had nothing to with which country they came from. Simply put, some wines scored consistently much higher than others, meaning that the tasters agreed that they were better wines, irrespective of where they came from.

Unsurprisingly, the analysis also shows that there were big differences between the critics, with some of them giving much higher scores than others, irrespective of the wine. I produced a graph of this in my previous post on this topic, which I have reproduced here. It shows who scored highest (at the top) and who scored lowest (at the bottom).

Conclusion

The statistical analysis makes it clear that the variation in scores was no different from what we would expect from any single collection of wines and people at one place and one time. Some wines scored better than others, and some people gave higher scores than others, and the country of origin had nothing to do with it.

That is, we would not expect the results to be repeatable. Nor were they, as have I already pointed out in two previous blog posts (Was the Judgment of Paris repeatable? Did California wine-tasters agree with the results of the Judgment of Paris?). Different people tasting the same wines produced different results.

There were lots of differences in scores between the wines and between the people, but not much difference between the countries. So, what was all of the fuss about? Cultural politics, is my guess.

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Analyses

I tried several different General Linear Models, using the Minitab package. The Country and Gender factors were both fixed; and the Wine and Person factors were nested within them.

Factor Country Wine(Country) Gender Person(Gender)

Type fixed random fixed random

Levels 2 20 2 11

The simplest model (as reported above) has only the four main factors.

Factor Country Wine Gender Person Residual

DF 1 18 1 9 190

Sum Squares 69.323 908.359 0.456 292.376 1699.168

F-value 1.37 5.64 0.01 3.63

P-value 0.256 0.000 0.908 0.000

It is also possible to add several of the interactions between pairs of the four factors. However, in this case some of the F-tests will only be approximate, based on adjusted sums-of-squares (these are indicated with an asterisk). The most complex model has three 2-factor interactions; adding the fourth 2-factor interaction collapses the model.

Factor Country Wine Gender Person Country*Gender Country*Person Gender*Wine Residual

DF 1 18 1 9 1 9 18 162

Adj. Sum Squares 50.464 576.866 0.767 250.450 1.146 104.767 67.162 1526.094

F-value 1.47 8.59 0.03 2.39 0.19 1.24 0.40

P-value 0.242 * 0.000 0.859 * 0.105 0.701 * 0.277 0.987

Note that in this analysis the Person factor is no longer statistically significant (due to the presence of the Person*Country interaction). Otherwise, the conclusions do not change.

Reporting of wine-industry reports: accuracy or exaggeration?

As a scientist, I am often intrigued by commentary in the popular press concerning the contents of formal scientific reports. It is clear that several things can happen: the reporter gets it roughly right, which has happened recently for much of the Covid-19 reporting; the reporter has not really understood things, and distorts the information, often badly; or the reporter simply exaggerates the whole thing, presumably for some sensationalist purpose of their own.

It is not really any different in the wine industry. There are a number of organizations conducting industry surveys, and providing what are usually called "insights" in a subsequent report. These reports are then summarized by the online wine media, sometimes accurately and sometimes not.

Having mentioned Covid-19, I will note that Wine Intelligence has recently started releasing a set of reports that they call the Covid-19 Impact Series. These are based on formal customer surveys in a range of important wine markets, both before and after the start of the pandemic, to assess the impact of changing customer behavior. In April and May they released reports on Australia, the USA, the UK, Portugal, France, and China; upcoming reports will be on Japan (June), and the Netherlands, and Germany (July). The publishers note that:

The first three Covid-19 Impact Reports from Wine Intelligence have focused on the English-speaking markets of Australia, the US, and the UK. Comparing the data shows some remarkable consistencies, but some equally interesting contrasts.

Both the report for Australia and the one for the USA have generated some commentary in the general wine media. The commentary conclusions seem to vary from quite accurate to wildly exaggerated.

In the first category we might include this quite extensive headline from Wine Industry Network Advisor: New Wine Intelligence COVID-19 Impact Report reveals Australian wine consumption is holding up but spend per bottle is down with many wine drinkers being cautious about going out once lockdown is over. You don't even need to read the rest of the article!

In the second category we might include their equally extensive headline regarding the USA report: US drinkers have increased wine consumption during lockdown, led by more involved drinkers, as interest in locally produced wine surges. The last word in that heading is based on the following graph, illustrating one survey response. I am sure that the wineries are happy with the small increase in interest, but it is a long way from a surge. Mind you, it is better than the results for foreign wines, which all showed a decrease.

Even more interesting is this headline from 1WineDude: We’re a bunch of lushes. The author, Joe Roberts, might be this, but I am not sure about the rest of us. In defense of his opinion, he notes these reported survey results:

Now, 9.3 wine occasions per month equates to having a glass (or two) of wine with your dinner every 3.3 days. Increasing the occasions to 9.7 per month equates to once every 3.1 days, which is a 4% increase in frequency. Such people are not lushes. Myself, I am likely to have wine with dinner twice per week, which is obviously once every 3.5 days; but I am an old man, and cannot behave like young people. When I was a university undergraduate student, it could easily have been five times per week; but the quality of the wines was much worse, of course.

Of much more interest to the US wine industry are some of the other survey results in the Wine Intelligence report. I will not exaggerate them, but simply reproduce them. In each case, click on the image to see it properly.

First, the good news: wine sales are up, (but not as much as bottled water).

Now, the bad news: social drinking occasions as not going to re-appear too soon.

Finally, the even worse news: boosting savings is now top priority, not spending money.

So, no-one is expecting the US wine industry to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic anytime soon.

The Most Admired Wine Brands are very different this year

I have written before about The World’s Most Admired Wine Brands (What is a "most admired" wine brand?). I noted that there has been a lot of variation in the list from year to year, and that “only the top three brands have shown any consistency at all — these are Torres (from Spain), Concha y Toro (from Chile), and Penfolds (from Australia).”

Well that all changed this year, the 10th such list, with a selection that looks very little like any previous one. This fact seems to have gone almost un-noticed in the wine world, possibly due to the current pandemic that is causing global disruption. There has been no official award ceremony, as yet (it was originally scheduled for March 15), nor much reaction from the successful wineries. Well, that does not stop me from making a few comments here.

What is a “most admired” wine brand?

Each year since 2011, the April edition of Drinks International magazine has contained a supplement with a survey called The World’s Most Admired Wine Brands. A group of more than 200 people are asked to vote for the wine brands they "most admire" based on the criteria that each brand should:

• be of consistent and / or improving quality
• reflect its region or country
• be well marketed and packaged
• respond to the needs and tastes of the target audience
• have broad appeal among wine consumers.

The people polled are drawn from “a broad spectrum of the global wine community”, which apparently includes: masters of wine, sommeliers, commercial wine buyers, wine importers and retailers, wine journalists, wine consultants and analysts, wine educators, and other wine professionals. These people are asked for three choices of wine brand. They are also provided with a list of previous winners, including “a list of more than 80 well-known brands and producers, but as usual we also encourage the option of free choices”.

The new list

This brings us to the 2020 list, which is much different to previous ones.

First, 15 of the wine brands are new to the list, in the sense that they have never appeared in any previous year. In addition, one brand (Ramon Bilbao, from Spain) has appeared only once before, and Gallo (from the USA) has appeared twice. Most of the others, however, are regulars.

Surprisingly, the top-ranked brand is new (Catena Zapata, from Argentina; pictured above), which has never happened before (except the first year!) — it normally takes a couple of years to work upwards to the top echelon. Furthermore, two out the top four are actually new (the other is 19 Crimes, from Australia). This is quite a high turnover at the top. (Note: Symington is also listed as new this year, but it owns Dow's Port and Graham's Port, both of which have each appeared in two previous lists.)

So, there are only nine (out of 50) brands that have appeared in all ten lists:

• Campo Viejo (Spain)
• Château Cheval Blanc (France)
• Château Pétrus (France)
• Cloudy Bay (New Zealand)
• Concha y Toro (Chile)
• Michel Chapoutier (France)
• Penfolds (Australia)
• Torres (Spain)
• Vega Sicilia (Spain)

These are presumably the most admired brands, long-term. Until this year, Torres was ranked either 1st or 2nd each year, but it has now dropped to 3rd.

There are also 15 brands that have appeared in all but one of the lists. However, in keeping with the current regime change, six of these were dropped from the 2020 list (ie. they had appeared in every previous list). Moreover, four of these newly dropped brands are famous Bordeaux chateaux: Château Haut-Brion, Château Lafite-Rothschild, Château Margaux, and Château Mouton-Rothschild. This is, indeed, a remarkable turn-around for the world’s best-known wine region, amid falling national and international sales.

This leads to the obvious question: why has “admiration” changed so much in the past 12 months? Admiration is admitted to be an intangible thing, but there seems to be some current volatility. However, just to emphasize the change, it has recently been noted that Argentina’s Bodega Catena Zapata reports best vintage in a decade — when you’re hot, you’re hot.

What is a "most admired" wine brand?

The short answer is: It depends on what year it is!

Each year, the April edition of Drinks International magazine contains a supplement with a survey called The World’s Most Admired Wine Brands. A group of people are asked to vote for the wine brands they "most admire" based on the criteria that each brand should:

• be of consistent and / or improving quality
• reflect its region or country
• be well marketed and packaged
• respond to the needs and tastes of the target audience
• have broad appeal among wine consumers.

So, while "admiration" is admitted to be an intangible thing, there are clearly a few pointers here.

The people polled are drawn from "a broad spectrum of the global wine community", which apparently includes: masters of wine, sommeliers, commercial wine buyers, wine importers and retailers, wine journalists, wine consultants and analysts, wine educators, and other wine professionals. There were only 60 people involved back in 2012, but there are now more than 200.

The people could originally vote for up to six wine brands, but apparently they are now asked for only three choices. Furthermore, they are provided with a list of previous winners, including "a list of more than 80 well-known brands and producers, but as usual we also encourage the option of free choices". David Williams has presented his own take on what it means to take part in this poll.

The polls

I have compiled the poll results for the years 2011-2018 inclusive. Each of the published lists contains only the results for the top 50 ranked wine brands in that year — all we know about the other brands is that were ranked lower than 50th place in that year.

Across the 8 years, 98 brands have appeared at least once in the lists. However, only 15 of these brands appeared in all 8 lists, with a further 10 brands appearing in 7 of the 8 lists. There were 20 brands that appeared only once each. There is thus a great deal of variability in "admiration" from year to year.

The first graph shows the yearly data for 9 of the wine brands that appeared in all 8 lists, with the vertical axis showing their ranking from 1st on down to 50th. As you can see, even for these brands their results varied dramatically from year to year. Indeed, only the top three brands have shown any consistency at all — these are Torres (from Spain), Concha y Toro (from Chile), and Penfolds (from Australia). Indeed, Torres was ranked either 1st or 2nd every year, which must make it the most admired brand of all.

To this list of consistent brands we can also add E. Guigal (from France) and Ridge (from the USA), both of which missed the 2011 list but had relatively consistent ranks thereafter (mostly in the top 10).

The second graph focuses on the wine brands from Bordeaux, including those that did not make it onto all 8 lists — this is far and away the best-represented wine region in the lists, with 10% of the brands.

These are all top wine chateaus, of course, with the most expensive wines. The most successful of them seems to be Château Margaux, but even it varies in rank from 7 to 29 across the years. Château Latour and Château d'Yquem are the only ones to get into the top 5 in at least one year, but these two chateaus then missed the list entirely in other years. Clearly, Bordeaux does not engender unmitigated admiration in the wine world.

As far as countries are concerned, France hosts 20% of the admired wine brands:

Bordeaux Rhône Burgundy Languedoc Beaujolais Provence General

10 3 2 2 1 1 1

You will note the very poor showing from Burgundy — there are not many large wine brands (only Louis Latour makes most of the lists), but instead a host of smaller brands marketing very expensive wine (Domaine de la Romanée-Conti makes it onto two lists).

The remaining countries include:

Australia Spain USA New Zealand Chile Italy South Africa Portugal    [Porto Germany Argentina Canada China Hungary Lebanon

13  13 11 8 7 6 6 5 4] 3 2 1 1 1 1

Even though the Porto region hosts 4 of Portugal's admired wine brands (Dow's, Graham's, Sandeman, Taylor's), these have only ever made it onto two of the lists (2016 and 2017).

The brands

I have provided a summary of the data relating to the individual brands in the following network. It displays all of those brands that appeared in at least 50% of the lists (ie. 4 out of 8). This is a form of multivariate data summary, as described in my post Summarizing multi-dimensional wine data as graphs, Part 2: networks. [Technical details: this is a neighbor-net based on the gower distance.]

Each brand is represented by a dot in the network. Brands that are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on their ranks across the 8 polls, and those that are further apart are progressively more different from each other. So, for example, the three top-ranked brands (Torres, Concha y Toro, Penfolds) are together at the top of the diagram, followed by the next pair (E. Guigal and Ridge). From there, the network progresses down to the less-admired wine brands at the bottom.

Note that Guigal and Ridge are at the head of a bunch of 13 wine brands, all of which are relatively highly admired. Then there is a group of 7 intermediate brands (the network area from Oyster Bay down to Pétrus), plus Marqués de Riscal on its own — the latter is isolated in the network only because it inexplicably missed the 2017 list.

You will also note the proximity in the network of Yellowtail to Château Mouton-Rothschild and Cheval Blanc! This should make you wonder about the criteria for "brand admiration".

The basic issue with these lists

There are potentially at least three things wrong with the "best of" type of list: (i) there is rarely any clear idea of what "best" is supposed to mean; (ii) the list is of arbitrary length (eg. Top-10 or Top-50 only); and (iii) the ranking does not reflect the differences in the original scores. In this instance, we have some idea of what "most admired" is supposed to mean; but the other two issues definitely apply here.

More importantly, there is an issue with interpretation that is rarely mentioned. To say, as many of the media have, that "In the 2018 poll the industry voted Torres the most-admired wine brand" is wrong, because there is no evidence that the people polled did any such thing. Indeed, we do not know how many people actually did put Torres (or any other brand) on their own personal list of three brands. All we know is that Torres is listed as the no. 1 brand because more people put it on their list than did so for any other brand — it may have been a lot of people or it may not.

To provide a concrete example of what I mean, I will refer to my previous discussion of a similar situation for the "Greatest Films Poll" produced every decade by Sight & Sound magazine, which lists the top films as voted by selected film critics. The critics are asked to each list 10 films; and in the most recent poll Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo topped the overall poll. However, the vast majority of the critics (77%) said that this film doesn't even belong in the top 10 (ie. it was not on their personal list), let alone first. However, it is listed as the no. 1 film, because more critics (23%) put it on their list than did so for any other film. Similarly, 91% of the critics said The Searchers should not be in the top 10, and yet it is ranked no. 7. So, the rank order of the films is simply that — a rank order; it does not tell you how many critics think highly of each film.

This is the same point that I am making for the wine brands, although in this case I do not have the detailed information to say exactly how many people listed each brand.

In a similar vein, anyone who knows anything about banking will known that "the most trusted bank" is nothing more than the "the least mistrusted bank". The distinction is not trivial for the consumer.

This knowledge does not stop the misuse of these sorts of lists, of course. For example, Voxy recently noted: "Villa Maria [was] named the world’s most admired New Zealand wine brand by Drinks International". This is, strictly speaking, true, but Villa Maria did go down from 4th rank overall last year to 8th this year!

In a future post I might looks at some of the other industry awards, such as The World Ranking of Wines and Spirits and The Drinks Business Awards.