Ethics in the wine industry, once more

Last year I wrote a blog post about The ethics of presenting the wine industry. Recently, another example has arisen that reflects a similar issue, which I will write about here.

Ethics in the wine industry is an ongoing topic — it usually involves questioning the (lack of?) ethics of some (many?) people in the industry. I have not written much about wine-industry ethics in this blog. This is not from a lack of interest in the topic, but for lack of anything much to say that might be a bit different from any other wine blogger.

However, in the previous post, I wrote about my experience seeing some of the vineyards in South Africa, notably the fact that those around Cape Town are right next to an enormous shanty town called Khayelitsha. I wrote:

The massive shanty town (as an Australian would call it) south-east of Cape Town was a great shock to my bus-load of middle-class Swedish tourists. The contrast with the Kruger National Park (lions, elephants, giraffes, buffalo, etc), and the lower-middle-class servers in the tourist industry, was stark. Everyone on the bus noticed, and everyone expressed concern.

One cannot miss the contrast, when you are there. However, you don’t see it in any of the wine-industry photos.

Recently, an article appeared in the Swedish media: Hot och slavlöner bakom viner sålda i Sverige. This translates as: Threats and slave wages behind wines sold in Sweden. It is based on a report from Swedwatch, a group that investigates the products sold commercially in Sweden, and the social circumstances under which those products are produced.

In this case, the object of their scrutiny is the Swedish national retail-alcohol chain, Systembolaget, insisting that they step up their sustainability efforts in the supply chain. The report concerns serious workers’ rights abuses on South African farms, linked to wines eventually sold at Systembolaget (and elsewhere, in other countries). They consequently “urge Systembolaget to better use its leverage as a large public retailer to drive meaningful change, including by implementing stricter and results-based human rights and environmental due diligence tailored for high-risk locations.”

The important point I wish to make here is much more general than this. Swedwatch target a single retail chain, but it is clear that the same claims can be made about all retailers of South African wine, everywhere. So, there are international implications for the Swedwatch investigation, which everyone in the wine industry should take onboard.

Swedwatch provide a full English-language summary of their report. However, their Key Research Findings are:

• Those interviewed reported working an average of nine hours per day, five days a week, earning R4,576 (around €223) a month — insufficient to adequately support their families.
• Various housing problems including leaking roofs (which may contain asbestos), broken electrical plugs, and limited access to drinking water and leaking toilets and taps that cause flooding.
• Discrimination against union members, for example by employers only granting permission to a leave or giving other benefits to non-union members.
• Exposure to hazardous pesticides without proper safety measures. Chemical compounds identified by the workers include Paraquat, which is banned in the EU and classified as harmful to the environment and health.

Swedwatch conclude that:

The testimonies show that the measures Systembolaget has taken so far to fulfill its obligations according to international guidelines have been insufficient. The organization also criticizes the lack of transparency in the supply chain. Systembolaget has read the report, and they claim to be aware of the problems depicted, and state that they are continuously working on the issues.

As noted above, Swedwatch target a single retail chain, but it is clear that the same claims can be made about all retailers of South African wine, worldwide, and they can all thus be asked to answer. This is, after all, an essential component of ethics in the wine industry. So, it would be interesting to know whether retailers in other countries are also willing to take onboard the issues highlighted.

The demise of the (old) wine industry?

Normally, in this blog I investigate and discuss some sort of wine-industry data; but this week’s post is more in the nature of an opinion piece. Please bear with me.

Things like global climate change (the negative effects of which substantially outweigh the positives), biodynamic agriculture, regenerative viticulture, sustainable winemaking, and worldwide over-supply are all undoubtedly big issues in the wine industry, and they rightly occupy a large amount of space in the wine-industry media. However, there is one issue that far exceeds all others — not many people want to drink wine any more. These other issues cannot be addressed properly until the latter one is addressed first; and so I will discuss it here.

The above graph shows recent world wine consumption (mhl) since 2007, as released by the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV). It is not a pretty sight.

There seem to be two issues that combine to create this disaster:

• declining consumption of alcohol among younger drinkers
• declining consumption of wine relative to other forms of alcohol, especially cheaper wines.

The first of these issues is obviously important in the long term (eg. it is estimated that 30% of Gen Z drink no alcohol at all), but it is the second issue that I will discuss here.

One of the basic consequences of this issue is, of course, that global wine production always exceeds consumption, as I have written about before:

When will world wine consumption finally catch up with production?
Why does world wine production always exceed consumption?

In response to this ongoing problem with the once-vibrant global wine industry, there have been many comments and suggestions. For example, Rob McMillan (in the Silicon Valley Bank State of the Wine Industry Report) focuses on two solutions:

Industry members either have to “work together to create a resonant message that positively influences consumption”, or “use whatever means we have to increase efficiency in production, grape growing, and marketing”.

However, neither of these is actually a solution, as neither deals with the fact that production > consumption. As Albert Einstein famously noted: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Using the same thinking, we would respond to over-supply by product discounting and price reductions, and by converting vineyards to other crops. This is short-term thinking, often following the current fashion (eg. Pink won’t save California wine). At worst, it is simply competing against each other, as “we all fish for the same consumers in the same pond” (7 ways to steal market share without lowering your price).

On the other hand, it seems to me that the fundamental problem is the wine industry itself, not the members of that industry. So, the members cannot resolve the problem, without a fundamental re-thinking of what that industry actually is. The industry has a customer problem — the current industry attitude seems to be: “we make this, and you should buy it”, whereas it needs to be: “you want this, and so we had better provide it”. That is, we must, as they say, change or die.

By this, I mean that so much of the current wine industry, as part of our culture, is exclusionary, rather than embracing. For example:

1. wine vocabulary is often exclusionary — its taxonomies and labeling confuse people, in its perceived need to “wax poetic” when describing wine sensations (discussed in Different wine talk)
2. the concept of wine tasting is exclusionary, because people need to be educated in order to appreciate wine, as well as needing to know about grape varieties and wine regions, for example (see Need to know)
3. we also have follow-on exclusionary practices, such as the Certified Wine Educator credential (see The insider’s guide to the CWE exam)
4. the price of good wine is often exclusionary, although there is definitely plenty of cheap stuff available (if you like that sort of thing)
   
5. also wine tourism is often financially exclusionary — eg. we charge large amounts for winery tastings (they were free in my day, which was the 1970s and 1980s) (see Sharing the dream: Let’s have a day of low-priced tastings)
   
6. even the labels are exclusionary, because most jurisdictions do not require an ingredients list on labels, unlike almost all other foods (although this is slowly changing).

This cannot go on. As recently noted by Rodolphe Lameyse (We need to reposition wine in a different way): “I think wine can’t go on being a product that lives by itself.” In particular, we need to explicitly take into account The digital habits of different generations — Gen X’s approach, Millennials’ money, and Gen Z on social media. These people are the customers, and we need to meet them on their terms, not ours.

As recently noted (Wine industry grapples with being something only Boomers like, as younger consumers have ‘mindshare of wine half that of their elders’):

The bigger problem is the wine-drinking consumer. Some 58% of consumers over the age of 65 — essentially, the Baby Boomer generation — prefer wine to other alcoholic beverages. All other demographics are nearly 30 points lower. Even worse for vineyards is that younger consumers aren’t as interested in wine. We must show the will to change and the creativity to evolve and adopt a new approach that retains current customers while appealing to a more diverse population.

 

In this regard, the single most sensible article about the wine industry that I have read in years appeared recently, from Jessica Broadbent:

Why branding could be behind falling wine consumption

I will go so far as to say that “could be” in that title can be changed to “is” — it just seems to be that obvious, to me. I was going to quote parts of the article, but I then realized that I would end up quoting almost all of it; so do yourself a favor and read it all for yourself.

The bottom line with the concept of branding is that a particular product is tailored for, and marketed to, a particular group of people. Provided that the product is manufactured in an acceptable manner (sustainable, biodynamic, etc), then all of the esoteric details referred to above are optional — the customer does not necessarily know them, and does not need to, unless they choose to. Put simply, no-one is excluded in any way, but they are embraced instead. If there are enough customers for the product, then it is sustainable, long-term.

Moreover, as also noted by Rodolphe Lameyse: “Some [vineyards] will no longer make wine but will produce grapes to the specifications set by others who will supply markets under perhaps generic brands.” In other words, the grapes may not only come from one huge generic region (like most bag-in-box wines do), they could come from multiple regions, and perhaps even different regions in different years. It is the brand that is important, not the region or the grape.

So, what grape varieties are involved, and where they come from, is pretty much irrelevant, in the big scheme of things. They could even change from year to year, and still be branded the same way. This idea is horrific to much of the current wine industry, especially in Europe, and also much of the USA; but the way things are going many of them won’t be there much longer, to feel that way. This saddens me, for sure, but a failure to change would sadden me even more. Stop looking in the mirror, and start looking at your (potential) customers, instead.

Einstein on the beach, by Oslo Davis.

The ethics of presenting the wine industry

Ethics in the wine industry is a continual topic, as a quick perusal of any wine industry news-site will show you (eg. Wine Industry Insight). It usually involves questioning the (lack of?) ethics of some (many?) people in the industry (especially with regard to tax compliance!). How big a difference is there between evading the law and breaking it?

I have not written much about wine-industry ethics in this blog. This is not from a lack of interest in the topic, but for lack of anything much to say that might be a bit different from any other wine blogger. However, a couple of events recently have changed that. So, here we go.

First, I was sent an email (thanks John Stallcup) drawing my attention to the blog of Scott Galloway (No Mercy / No Malice), and specifically the post on Firewater. You should check it out, as it is both interesting and very well written. The author does not shy away from ethics, or any other topic.

The second thing is that I finally made it to South Africa (see the photo above). This was fascinating, especially for me as a biologist — the plants and animals are unique, and it was great to see them in situ; and the landscape reminds me very much of my homeland (Australia). Moreover, my wife’s parents long ago worked for Svenskakyrkan (the Church of Sweden) as school teachers for the black children of what was then called Rhodesia. So, South Africa is pretty close to her original homeland, too.

What does this have to do with the wine industry? That is simple, because I have now been to wine-lands on several continents (Australia, North America, Europe, South America); and their contrast with South Africa is, in one particular way, stark.

Vineyards in Australia, for example, are nested among the bushland (as we call it), so that the backdrop is often native eucalypt trees, etc. Vineyards in northern Europe, for example, are spread along romantic rivers with scattered medieval villages. These sorts of things are part of the image that the wine industry tries to promulgate for itself; and by and large it is accurate.

However, it would be just as accurate to note, for example, that the European villages were once the home-land of abject poverty; the Middle Ages were not a time to be a poor serf — servile life was no fun, and death at a young age was rampant. The Plague (or Black Death) was not something that was easy to live through. However, we do not see any of that in the modern world, so that wine tourists can focus on the romance. Focus on enjoyment, and the quality of life, is important.

South Africa, in some ways, is another matter. Sure, there are vineyard regions that are very familiar to me from growing up in Australia, in both look and feel (although the eucalypt trees growing there are not native, but were introduced by Europeans). However, by contrast there are the vineyards around Cape Town. The massive shanty town (as an Australian would call it) south-east of Cape Town was a great shock to my bus-load of middle-class Swedish tourists. The contrast with the Kruger National Park (lions, elephants, giraffes, buffalo, etc), and the lower-middle-class servers in the tourist industry, was stark. Everyone on the bus noticed, and everyone expressed concern. Our guide, on the other hand, kept the same neutral tone as he had throughout the trip, while he explained what the government was doing about it, and planning to do.

These slums (named Khayelitsha) are possibly the third largest in the world (8 cities with the world’s largest slums), with perhaps one million residents. They are not the only slums in South Africa (List of slums in South Africa), but probably a third of Cape Town's 3.7 million residents live in its slums (The tale of two slums in South Africa). As you can imagine, Life in South African shanty towns is not easy.

The point here is that some of the vineyards of Cape Town are right next to this enormous shanty town, as shown in the photo above, and on the Google Map below (Khayelitsha is outlined, and one of the nearby vineyards is named). One cannot miss the contrast, when you are there. However you don’t see it in any of the wine-industry photos (see the second photo above).

For me, the wine industry and vineyards will never be the same again. I can no longer look at a village on the Rhine River, nested among the vineyards, without seeing life as it was in the Middle Ages, when the villages came into being. I ask myself: how ethical is it to only ever show the romance? The ethics of only showing this is one of omission, not commission — no-one is faking anything, but they sure as hell are leaving some things out.

I am also reminded of another much simpler, but equally notable, part of my own recent history. On 7 November 2023 it was 150 years since the Swedish parliament decided to formally allow women to attend the country’s universities, and this was duly noted in my local newspaper here in Uppsala. This historical event was way ahead of what happened in most other countries, which is a very positive aspect that Swedes are proud of. However, we should not ignore the fact that Sweden has some of the oldest universities in the world, with Uppsala University founded way back in 1477 and Lund University in 1666 (although it traces its roots back to 1425). So, which do we focus on — the later 150 years (with women) or the first 400 years (without women)? My argument is that, ethically, we should see both; but it seems to me that the wine industry would probably not do so.

[All of the photos above were taken by Susanne Stenlund.]

The alleged health benefits of wine depend on who funded the research

Every week or two we seem to get another published article telling us about some potential health benefits of wine. Sadly, these articles often contradict each other, as I have already written about myself (for a list of posts, see The effects of alcohol on the human body).

Recently, Adrian Chiles wrote a strongly worded opinion piece about this topic for The Guardian newspaper: Drinking alcohol is bad for you — end of. Ignore the headlines that claim otherwise. Here, I will supplement his words with some ideas that he did not specifically cover.

First, I will start by quoting Chiles at length, because it is important to emphasize his ideas. He wrote:

It’s amazing how easy it is to persuade us that what we want to be true is true. Consider a typical headline to a story covered with great enthusiasm by many major news organisations this week: “Moderate alcohol consumption may lower stress, reduce heart disease risk, study finds.” Enthusiastic drinkers, drowning in a dark sea of health warnings, will cling on to such words as stricken sailors might hold on to the hull of their capsized boat.

They will turn a blind eye to the facts of the story, although even the headline itself, with its “may” and its “study finds”, suggests this scientific revelation isn’t quite the slam dunk we might be hoping for. Once the study’s methodology and conclusions are outlined, it’s clear that the whole thing falls into the category of quite interesting, rather than this changes everything. But who needs that level of detail? If I’m so minded, there’s as much information in the headline as I’m ever going to want or need to support my long-cherished pet theory about drinking. “I knew it! I told you so! Drinking helps me deal with stress, ergo it eases the strain on my poor ticker, therefore I’ll live longer and more happily.” I’ll file this fact away along with that one about red wine being good for you, as good as a health drink.

On the other side of the argument, to counter all this, the public health lobby takes an ever more severe position. The World Health Organization is now saying that when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health. While this might be technically true, it also has an absurdity to it. As David Spiegelhalter, then professor for the public understanding of risk at Cambridge University, pointed out when England’s chief medical officer said something similar in 2018: “There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.”

My contributed addition in this current post is to point out a publication by Su Golder & Jim McCambridge: Alcohol, cardiovascular disease and industry funding: A co-authorship network analysis of systematic reviews.

They studied a set of 60 published reviews concerning cardiovascular disease (CVD) and alcohol, written by a total of 231 unique authors. There were 14 reviews undertaken by authors with histories of alcohol industry funding, including 5 that were funded directly by the alcohol industry itself. The remaining 46 had no such funding identified.

Their conclusion was:

Nearly a quarter (23%, 14/60) of systematic reviews undertaken on the impact of alcohol on CVD had a known connection to alcohol industry funding. These formed distinct co-authorship subnetworks within the literature. [An example is shown above, where each point represents an author and the lines represent who they worked with.] All reviews by authors with histories of alcohol industry support identified a health protective effect of alcohol, whereas those with no known history of support were approximately evenly divided, with 54% (25/46) concluding there was evidence of health protective effects.

The reviews associated with the industry were more likely to study broader CVD outcomes, as opposed to more specific CVD outcomes such as hypertension or stroke, had a higher number of included studies, and were more influential, being more likely to be cited by others. ... Over time the proportion of systematic reviews on CVD and alcohol authored by those with histories of funding by industry has declined, and there has been an increase in reviews more likely to conclude there is no evidence for cardio-protection.

The citations data attest to the enduring influence of the idea that alcohol may be good for the heart within scientific communities, as well as having a hold on public and policy perceptions of alcohol. This idea has been assiduously promoted by the alcohol industry, for whom it looks clearly important to political strategies. This study demonstrates that there is a need not only to resolve the long running controversy, but also to pay attention to the actions of the alcohol industry in influencing the science. It is striking how little we know about a subject that does such large and growing damage to global health.

So, there you have it. Who funds the research has a big influence on what the published results will be. Quite possibly, you do not bite the hand that feeds you, even in academia! Anyway, as Adrian Chiles noted: You can often ignore the headlines, but don't ignore the details.

Should we worry about Artificial Intelligence in wine writing?

Recently, Richard Hemming published a short article called Are wine writers redundant? Most of the actual text was produced by the HAIMKE Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, under the guidance of Yoav Shoham. Yoav said: "Cute, I think", while Richard said: "Terrifying, I'd say." These are two extreme viewpoints, of course, and reality is presumably somewhere in between. But where?

To me, the important point to note is that two human beings were actually involved in producing the article — and none of us would bother reading it if there had been no people involved at all. Being human is a rather human activity, which means that it is based on social interactions. Humans interact with other humans by choice. If things are done by machine, then they have no especial human interest.

After all, isn't that the fundamental cause of the current second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which infections are increasing to levels not seen for several months? People are thoroughly sick of all those months of "social distancing", and having to look like masked bank robbers making a getaway. They want some social human contact, such as they previously had in their lives (and which they one day will have again). So, the restaurants and bars are full, and the young people are partying again. The virus loves it. (For an interesting discussion of the psychology of our current pandemic responses, see: Acedia: the lost name for the emotion we’re all feeling right now.)

So, should we worry about AI in wine writing? Only if the readers want no social contact with another human being. A blog post concerns human communication, for example, as do YouTube videos, FaceBook messages and Twitter tweets. The world is full of noise, of course, but in amongst it there are some real attempts at communication.

You see, the thing about AI is that it is and it isn't. It is artificial, and it isn't intelligent. Even though we call it "machine learning", the computer doesn't actually learn anything. All that most AI systems can do is take a massive amount of input data, and create an organized database that synthesizes the observed patterns of relationships among the different parts of the data. Then, when the system is later given one of the components as a new input, it produces a closely matching output. Impressive, sure, especially when the output looks natural; but human beings are not quite that mechanical — indeed, humans often need only one previous example of something, in order to correctly identify new examples.

We will, of course, be seeing many more uses of AI in the future; and I have written about some of them before (Artificial intelligence in the wine industry? Not yet, please!). Car driving is an obvious candidate, given just how bad most humans are at it. I have always thought that the most remarkable thing about people is their ability to fall asleep at the wheel. Cars can kill, as hundreds of people find out every day; and yet our minds grasp this fact so poorly that they think it is a good time to take a nap while driving. AI has the potential to alleviate the danger of this situation. Even bad AI will probably be better than many human drivers.

So, AI can be used for many things, including unexpected ones. As one interesting example, while there are specialist computer programs for playing the game of chess (eg. Deep Blue, Stockfish, AlphaZero), even a general text AI system can also do it (such as HAIMKE, referenced above) — this is called "natural language processing" (NLP). Chess moves can be written in the form of words (see Chess notation), and so a text-based AI system can be given a large collection of chess games that have previously been played. Even without any further instructions about how chess is played, after it has generated its database, it will have discovered all of The most common chess openings. Then, in response to any given chess move, it will respond with one of those opening gambits, just like a person would. The system knows nothing about chess, not even the concept of a chess board, let alone the rules of play — it simply produces what are apparently appropriate (text-based) responses to any new (text-based) input. Under these circumstances, is this system really "playing" chess?

Anyway, it seems that our children's children will be living in a different world, and this will be an AI one for sure. But I doubt that they will be reading wine writing if they know it was "written" by a computer rather than a person — there is an important difference between creative "writing" and mere "text generation". The latest NLP systems can produce some pretty remarkable performances, such as creating poetry that seems just like the real thing (see GPT-3 creative fiction); but is there much of a market for it? * AI has its obvious uses, but human communication is not one of them.

Mind you, the products of actual Wine Writers often seem far too much like repetition of the same old stuff, year after year; so I guess that the AI people will see reproducing this as pretty easy for a computer to do. Interestingly, this response might very well stimulate more creative forms of human wine writing, which would not be a bad thing. After all, this is what actually happened with chess (AI ruined chess: now, it’s making the game beautiful again).

At least this year the wine writers had some new things to write about, which is something that AI systems cannot (yet) do. However, I hope that we do not have to write about fires and pandemics too often!

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* See also: Experimental evidence that people cannot differentiate AI-generated from human-written poetry.

How do Covid-19 lock-downs affect wine blog readership?

In short, negatively.

I have written once before about the Covid-19 pandemic (There seems to be a lot of public misunderstanding about the coronavirus). Most of what I said then is still true now, in hindsight.

However, there are number of quite significant things that have become obvious since then, with hindsight. The extent to which many people are asymptomatic is perhaps the biggest thing, because these people are unknowingly spreading the virus (SARS-CoV-2) to others. This is perhaps the main reason why we have a pandemic rather than a simple outbreak (such as with annual flu hot-spots) — it is estimated that anything up to 85% of cases (virus infections) have gone unreported (as the disease) in some countries.

This is an important point, given that a number of places are now starting to ease their quarantine restrictions, popularly known as lock-downs or shut-downs. These lock-downs have had very variable success at decreasing the rate of spread of the virus. For example, comparing countries near my home, they seem to have worked well in Norway and Finland, but much less well in the United Kingdom. Indeed, the UK has a worse infection rate than we have here in Sweden, where the quarantine strategies are voluntary rather than mandatory. The USA, of course, has an even worse infection rate than the UK.

The specialists are all warning of a resurgence of infections, as the successfully quarantined people (ie. never infected) come out from behind their locked doors and meet infectious situations (ie. people and places with the virus). This usually happens with infectious diseases, and so there is no reason to think it won’t happen this time, as well. It seems that people retain the virus in their bodies for anything up to 4-5 weeks after infection, rather than merely the 10 days or so during which they have disease symptoms.

This means that the virus is still circulating in our environment, even though many people are now immune (ie. they got the virus, and now have produced antibodies to it). This is why testing of asymptomatic people is seen as a key to our future response to the pandemic (for a wine-related report, see Coronavirus: asymptomatic testing for vineyard where worker tested positive).

Blog readership

Anyway, it is time to consider something that I have not seen reported, as yet, by bloggers. I keep a bit of an eye on the readership of my various blog posts, and it has been obvious that the lock-downs had a quite quick effect on the weekly number of page-views of my blog. If we exclude the possibility that (i) I suddenly started writing boring posts (which cannot be excluded completely), or that (ii) people are too busy reading about the economic, social and biological effects of viruses to have much time for wine blogs (which seems unlikely), or (iii) many of my readers have become ill (which would be very sad), then we might conclude that the drop in blog readership is due to changed social behavior by some of my previous readers.

Overall blog readership is shown in the first graph, which simply counts the total number of page-views for each of the past 7 months. The April readership is 78% of the average for the prior months. This is not too bad.

However, the most obvious effect is on the readership of individual posts. Most of my blog readers access each post on the day it is posted. Only a few of the posts continue to attract new readers thereafter. So, a graph of the page-views for each post since the beginning of the year is very revealing about weekly readership. This analysis provides data for 10 pre-virus posts and 8 post-virus posts, if we exclude the post that was actually about the virus itself (on March 23rd), rather than about wine.

If we compare the pre- and post-virus posts (next graph), then the readership of the latter is only 35% of the former, on average. This is a pretty serious drop in readership, as two-thirds of my regular readers have disappeared into the æther. (Mind you, this is slightly less than the estimated four-fifths drop in champagne sales.)

This dip among readers started during the first week of March, which does coincide with the first global effects of the coronavirus. Although lock-downs in the USA were not fully enforced until the end of March (except in North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming), most things started much earlier. The World Health Organization declared a worldwide pandemic on 11th March; and even the tardy United Kingdom started their lock-down 12 days later. Moreover, the USA started implementing stay-at-home recommendations during the same week as the WHO declaration. American restaurant reservations took a dive on 9th March, although New York started its decline 10 days earlier (How coronavirus is devastating the restaurant business); and hourly jobs posted on Snagajob actually started dropping from March 5 (Hourly job market update: categories where jobs are growing, and where they are gone).

The immediate cause of the drop in readership may well be a combination of reduced work-based access to computers, as well as a lack of work-based activity of any sort. The USA officially had 15% unemployment back in April, with a “currently-not-employed” level higher than that; and Los Angeles now reports a 24% unemployment level, which has not been seen since The Great Depression (24.9% in 1933).

The pandemic has certainly been disruptive for most parts of the wine industry, and the hospitality business in general. Sadly, this is likely to continue, because most current media surveys indicate that people are not going to be returning to restaurants and bars in a hurry. More to the point, the anticipated ongoing customer-distancing (quarantine) requirements are not going to be economically viable in an industry that usually requires 80% capacity just to break even,

If nothing else, with a slow return to something closer to normality, it will be a relief to start reading some wine-related writing that isn’t about the depressing effects of Covid-19.

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Footnote

The biggest wine-related effect of the pandemic on me, personally, has been my inability to get the wines I want. I have mentioned in previous posts that the wines of usual interest come as part of the “occasional assortment”, which has releases every couple of weeks, as they come in small supply (Wine monopolies, and the availability of wine). I usually have to order these wines, for delivery to my local store, because my town is poorly serviced in the shops (My annoyances with my alcohol monopoly). Well, this is the only service that Systembolaget has changed — they have cancelled order delivery of these particular wines, and these wines only. If the wine is not in your local store, then tough. So, I have not bought much wine lately, apparently unlike most of the rest of the world. How ironic!

Christmas traditions

At this time last year, I presented The first wine-themed Christmas card, which was from 1843.

If you are interested in knowing more about Christmas cards, then the Moo card site once produced an infographic compiling some of the more interesting bits of information. I have included it here because it is no longer available on the original web site. Click on it to see the infographic at full size.

An amazing amount of other information about Christmas Traditions & Customs around the world can also be found at the Why Christmas web site.

God jul och gott nytt år!

You may (not) be surprised which Wine Gourd posts are least popular

As a blog author, I sometimes check on which of my posts are popular and which not. One of my least-popular posts, to date, raises some concerns, at least in my mind, about the wine industry.

Anyway, let’s start with a picture of the 186 posts published up until the end of October. [Note: last week’s post was published at the usual time, but Blogger did not send out emails to subscribers until a day later. Blogger’s email system has generated many complaints from users, over the past couple of months.]

The posts are shown in the graph in chronological order (horizontally), with the number of page-views reported by Blogger vertically (as at 9th November).

Since most of the posts get most of their page-views within a week of being posted, there is no reason to expect that the poorly read posts in this list will acquire too many more readers. It took a while for the blog to get going, so it was a month or so before viewers increased; then there was a slow peak in numbers, after which the number of page-views per post settled down. The 10 earliest posts may never be read!

At the top end of the scale, the most popular posts are listed in the side-bar at the right of this page, so we don't need to discuss them here. My interest here lies in the other end of the scale.

The recent posts that have received fewer than c. 200 page-views are (in rank order):

• The first wine-themed Christmas card (1843)
• Medical practitioners and malt whisky
• Let the author beware
• Getting the question right
• Difficulties restricting alcohol sales to minors in the Internet Age

The first two of these were the Christmas posts for 2018 and 2017, respectively, so maybe that is not unexpected — however, the first one does point out that the the first known commercially produced Christmas card celebrates wine as well as Christmas. The next two posts are somewhat esoteric.

So, the post that I wish to discuss here is the last one in this list. It explores the two current scenarios for online sales of alcohol, in face of the legal requirement that people under a certain age should neither order wine nor receive it.

Some of my correspondents are not at all surprised that this post has been effectively ignored. It addresses a thorny issue for the wine industry, and one that seems to be: (i) ignored by practitioners, and (ii) over-looked by commentators. The wine industry seems not to be overly concerned about the possibility of providing alcohol to minors.

Further discussion

In the interests of continuing my discussion of this topic, below I point out that the wine industry in at least one country has tackled this issue for themselves (ie. without government interference): Australia. I think that the wine industries elsewhere could do a lot worse than trying something similar.

The organization concerned is Retail Drinks Australia Limited, which is the national industry association representing the interests of all off-licensees in Australia (ie. everywhere that supplies alcohol without being licensed to serve alcohol to the public, such as a bar, pub or restaurant).

They have recently produced a detailed document called the Online Alcohol Sale and Delivery Code of Conduct. Below, I quote selected parts of this document; in particular, section 4.1.3 presents a practical way of tackling the legal requirements.

The Retail Drinks Online Code is an industry-wide framework developed in collaboration with government and community to enhance compliance in the responsible online sale and delivery of alcohol ... The Code seeks to address one of the challenges in regulating online alcohol sale and delivery, which is that liquor licensing legislation is state and territory based, but the marketplace is national.

The voluntary industry Code provides a robust, best-practice and fit-for-purpose framework governing the rapidly growing online alcohol sale and delivery market ... The Code covers all points of the direct-to-consumer process involved in online alcohol purchases and deliveries, nationally ... Signatories to the Code cover more than 80 per cent of all alcohol sold online in Australia.

4.1.3 Identification Procedures

    Retailers must adopt adequate procedures in their systems which verify that Customers are aged over 18. For the purposes of this clause, the extent and manner of the adequate procedures can be determined by the Retailer but must include more than only manual date of birth entry (age-check) by the Customer.

    Any person accepting the delivery of alcohol, either the Customer or another adult, is required to provide sufficient identification documents upon accepting a delivery if they appear to look under the age of 25.

Acceptable forms of identification in this instance include:.

• Australian or Foreign Passport;
• Australia Post Keypass in Digital iD™ in relevant approved jurisdictions;
• Australia Post physical Keypass proof of age card;
• Australian Proof of Age document;
• Drivers Licence or permit issued by an Australian State or Territory;
• Drivers Licence issued by a foreign country; and
• Photo Card issued by a public authority of the Commonwealth or of another State or Territory for the purpose of attesting to a person’s identity and age.

Alcohol industries elsewhere should take note of the entire Code of Conduct, and try something similar for themselves. It may not be easy, but it does seem necessary in the Internet Age.

The modern ranking of Bordeaux left-bank wines

A few weeks ago, I looked at what various modern commentators have written about how modern Bordeaux wines compare to the official 1855 Bordeaux Classification of the Médoc châteaux (Making modern sense of the 1855 Bordeaux classification). In that post, I looked only at the five groupings of the châteaux — Premier Crus Classés through to Cinquièmes Crus Classés (First to Fifth Growths),

However, classifications are artificial, because they usually have arbitrary boundaries between the groups. In this case, wine quality varies continuously, and the best wines in one group are therefore not all that different from the worst wines in the next higher group. As I noted in the previous post, no-one wants to be the top château in class 3 instead of the bottom château in class 2.

This issue can easily be circumvented for the Médoc wines, because the original assessment, by the Bordeaux Brokers’ Association, actually ranked the top Haut-Médoc châteaux (as well as putting them into groups). This ranking was intended to be based on quality, as determined by the long-term prices achieved by the various wines.

Obviously, this process can be repeated in the modern world; and so it comes as no surprise that various people have done so. I will be looking at their results here.

Modern ranking schemes

I have compiled the data from a number of modern rankings. These are attempts to rank the châteaux anew, in their modern context, without direct reference to the ranking of 1855. However, it is worth noting that this procedure is somewhat confounded by the fact that the current prices are influenced by the 1855 ranking in the first place.

In all cases, these rankings are derived from a calculated score of some sort.

1. Gary M. Thompson and Stephen A. Mutkoski (2011) Reconsidering the 1855 Bordeaux classification of the Médoc and Graves using wine ratings from 1970-2005. Journal of Wine Economics 6: 15-36. The list was based on the quality scores from three expert wine ratings (Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, International Wine Cellar). The châteaux ranking was then derived from a regression analysis incorporating a number of relevant factors.
2. Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh (1996) Pricing red wines of Médoc vintages from 1949 to 1989 at Christie's auctions. Journal de la Société Statistique de Paris 137: 19-49. Based on auction sales prices from 1980–1992. The châteaux ranking was derived from a regression analysis incorporating a number of relevant factors.
3. (a) Orley Ashenfelter (1988) A new and objective ranking of the chateaux of Bordeaux (based on auction prices, of course!). Liquid Assets 5: 1–9. (b) Orley Ashenfelter (1997) A new objective ranking of the chateaux of Bordeaux. Liquid Assets 13: 1-6. These two lists were based on average auction sale prices from 1985–1988 and 1994–1996, respectively. I averaged the two listed scores for each château.
4. The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 Index tracks the trading-exchange prices of 100 top wines (95% of which are from Bordeaux). Rankings of the Bordeaux châteaux, based on average prices over the previous 2-5 years, were produced in 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. I have taken the average of these list prices. Sadly, the 2017 list has only 48 châteaux, not 60, with only five 5th growths listed — the text says “5eme – £250 to £312” but the list has nothing < £274.

This provides us with nine separate rankings of the wines, based on:

1. auction prices 1980–1992 2. auction prices 1985–1988 3. auction prices 1994–1996 4. wine-exchange prices 2003–2007 5. wine-exchange prices 2005–2009

6. wine-exchange prices 2007–2011 7. wine-exchange prices 2009–2013 8. wine-exchange prices 2016–2017 9. wine-quality ratings 1970–2005

Obviously some of these price periods overlap, which will give extra weight to data from the duplicated years. Also, the ninth ranking is based on expertly assessed quality, which is only loosely related to price. Nevertheless, combining these rankings still seems like a worthwhile exercise; and so this is what I will do below.

Another issue is: exactly which châteaux were included in each ranking. For my purposes here, the number varies from 58–68, out of a total list of 70 châteaux. The differences stem from the slightly different purposes of the authors, and what data were available to them. There were 61 châteaux from the original 1855 list (it started at 58, in 1855, but some estates have been sub-divided and others combined), plus nine extra châteaux that make it into the rankings of various of the researchers, based on the modern quality of the wines.

Comparing the rankings

So, when comparing these nine modern rankings, the number of times each château has been ranked varies. Two-thirds of the châteaux (46 / 70) appear in all of the rankings, and 65 / 70 appear in more than half of the rankings, but some château appear only rarely (eg. the small estate Château Desmirail appears only twice, even though it was included in 1855).

In order to address these inequalities, each ranking scheme was converted to a proportion from 0 to 1, before being compared to the other rankings. The ranking schemes can then be compared most easily using the standard Correlation coefficient.

First, the correlations among repeat rankings by the same people are all >80%, and actually go up to 97% (Liv-ex 2013 versus Liv-ex 2015). So, at least we can say that the researchers are consistent through time — once they get a ranking they pretty much stick to it!

Second, in most cases the correlations between people are much lower, in the range 50–70%. This is still quite high, as a half to two-thirds of the variation in rankings is shared between the researchers. The cause of the variation that is not shared is not discernible in any detail, other than to say that the different sources of prices clearly have some effect.

The main exceptions to this point are the correlations between the ranking of Di Vittorio & Ginsburgh and the two rankings by Ashenfelter, which are 91-93%. These are based on auction prices covering the years 1980 to 1996, and so it is perhaps no surprise that they produce very similar rankings of the châteaux. Oddly, though, the correlation between the rankings of Ashenfelter 1988 and 1997 is only 83%, indicating that there are numerous small changes in the rankings over the decade separating the two.

Of these modern rankings, we might expect that the Ashenfelter and Di Vittorio & Ginsburgh rankings would most closely match the procedure allegedly used by the Bordeaux Brokers’ Association to produce the 1855 ranking. However, this does not mean that they closely match that ranking. Indeed, the correlations of the modern rankings with the 1855 ranking are mostly 30–40% (actual range 29–47%). That is, only about one-third of the variation in today's rankings matches the situation in 1855 — there is much more difference than there is similarity.

The modern ranking

So, what might a new ranking look like? Given that there is more similarity than difference among the modern rankings, we could simply combine them, by calculating the average rank for each château across the nine rankings. I have included the final list at the bottom of this post.

We can get a feel for this combined ranking by using a simple stripe plot, as show next. Each vertical stripe represents one of the 70 châteaux, with the average-rank scores increasing from left (best) to right (last).

Based on what we see here, we could, if we wanted, group the châteaux, although it would not be into five classes, as was done in 1855. Three main groups would be practical, although the second and third of these could then be further sub-divided.

There would be 13 châteaux in the top class, with no distinction between First Growth and Second Growth, as there was in 1855 (five First and 14 Second). This seems to accord with modern opinion, that the best of the Seconds are not less than the Firsts.

There are also three châteaux at the bottom of the ranking that probably should not be included in the list, as being consistently inferior these days: Château Cos Labory, Château Belgrave, and Château Lynch-Moussas.

Finally, we can visually compare this modern ranking with that of 1855. The dots at the left represent the châteaux ranks in 1855 (from bottom to top), and these are connected by lines to their position in the 2019 ranking. The gaps in the 2019 ranking represent those châteaux that were not ranked in 1855, while the groups of 2–3 dots in the 1855 ranking represent those properties that have since been sub-divided.

Note that at the top of the list (the bottom of the figure) there have been only local changes in the ordering. However, elsewhere there have been wholesale changes in rank order. As noted above, there is much more difference than there is similarity in the two lists.

Of course, who knows what will happen next, if global climate change has the expected effects on the wine industry. Check with your local wine blogger in 10 years’ time.

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Ranking of the Médoc châteaux
based on the average ranks from the nine modern rankings

Château Latour
Château Lafite-Rothschild
Château Mouton Rothschild
Château Margaux
Château Haut-Brion
Château La Mission-Haut-Brion
Château Palmer
Château Léoville-Las Cases
Château Cos d'Estournel
Château Ducru-Beaucaillou
Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande
Château Montrose
Château Lynch-Bages
—————————————————————
Château Pichon Longueville Baron
Château Pape-Clément
Château Léoville-Barton
Château Beychevelle
Château Léoville-Poyferré
Château Haut-Bailly
Château Calon-Ségur
Château Gruaud-Larose
Château Grand-Puy-Lacoste
Château Pontet-Canet
Château Rauzan-Ségla
Château La Lagune
Domaine de Chevalier
Château Lascombes
Château Branaire-Ducru
Château Smith-Haut-Lafite
Château Duhart-Milon-Rothschild
Château Giscours
Château Saint-Pierre
Château Talbot
Château Malescot St. Exupéry
Château Brane-Cantenac
Château Langoa-Barton
Château Chasse-Spleen [doubtful position due to few data]
Château Clerc-Milon
Château d'Issan
Château Cantenac-Brown
Château d'Armailhac [aka Mouton Baronne Philippe]
—————————————————————
Château Lagrange
Château Cantemerle
Château Haut-Batailley
Château Boyd-Cantenac
Château Prieuré-Lichine
Château Batailley
Château Gloria
Château Kirwan
Château Rauzan-Gassies
Château Haut-Marbuzet
Château Durfort-Vivens
Château Ferrière
Château Malartic-Lagravière
Château Grand-Puy-Ducasse
Château Haut-Bages-Libéral
Château Marquis de Terme
Château Lafon-Rochet
Château Pédesclaux
Château Marquis d'Alesme Becker
Château Pouget
Château du Tertre
Château Croizet Bages
Château La Tour-Carnet
Château Desmirail [doubtful position due to few data]
Château Dauzac
Château de Camensac
—————————————————————
Château Cos Labory
Château Belgrave
Château Lynch-Moussas

Making modern sense of the 1855 Bordeaux classification

Everyone who is anyone in the wine world has had something to say about the official 1855 Bordeaux Classification of the Médoc wines. Mainly, however, this classification is 165 years out of date, and it completely ignores the concept of terroir — it was the wineries (châteaux) that were classified, not the vineyards.

For most wine drinkers, the only current consequence of the 1855 classification is that it ensures that the châteaux wines are no longer affordable, even at the lower levels of the ranking. However, occasionally, some people have had a go at producing an updated version of this classification of the Châteaux, one that might have more relevance than the merely historical significance of the original document.

In this post, I want to draw a simple picture that shows how similar or dissimilar some of these modern classifications are to each other, as well as to the original of 1855.

Background

In 1855 the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce requested the Bordeaux Brokers’ Association to rank and classify the top Haut-Médoc châteaux according to quality, ranking them into five categories. This was done for use at the Exposition Universelle de Paris, the world’s fair of the day.

So, the châteaux were listed in rank order, based on the long-term prices achieved by the various wines, plus some local politicking (the prestige of the wine and the owner, etc). Château Cantemerle was then added to the end of the list in 1856. These wine producers are collectively referred to as the Cru Classé. They were grouped into these five classes:

Premier Crus Classés
Deuxièmes Crus Classés
Troisièmes Crus Classés
Quatrièmes Crus Classés
Cinquièmes Crus Classés

These are usually referred to in English as the First to Fifth Growths, respectively.

If you want to read more about all of this, then Dewey Markham has written a book on the subject, with every conceivable detail of the Bordeaux classifications of wine both before and after 1855 (1855: a History of the Bordeaux Classification. John Wiley & Sons, 1997). See also this review: The 1855 Bordeaux Classification: genius or inertia?

The topic is obviously of some importance to the vignerons of Bordeaux; and indeed “1855” has recently been copyrighted under European law. The classification continues to play a large part in contemporary wine lore, and it seems to be a big determinant of wine prices — eg. the five First Growths sell for 3-6 times the price of the best-regarded Second Growths, even though it is widely acknowledged by wine critics that today they are not much better in quality.

However, it is preposterous to imagine that this ancient ranking could still apply unchanged today. For example, at the time the wines were first classified, the total amount of cultivated land owned by the 61 chateaux was 2,650 hectares — today, they cumulatively own almost 3,500 hectares of vines (a 30% increase). Much of this land has changed hands over the past century, often several times. Notably, Château Gloria is not a Cru Classé (ie. it was not included on the 1855 list), but today its vineyards all come from plots of lands that were originally part of Cru Classé estates.

Similarly, since 1855 the original list has actually increased, from 58 to 61. Three estates, “Léoville”, “Pichon” and “Batailley”, have been split into several châteaux (3, 2 and 2, resspectively), while two originally separate names, “Pouget” and “Pouget-Lassale”, have since been combined into one. Also, the “Dubignon” estate has disappeared, with its vineyards now part of other properties. Château Mouton-Rothschild was moved from Second Growth to First Growth, by presidential decree in 1973.

As a result, modern prices sometimes deviate greatly from the 1855 status. For example, the Fifth Growth Château Pontet-Canet now charges as much as many of the Second Growth châteaux (eg. Punching above its weight class: Chateau Pontet Canet), and Third Growth Château Palmer is more expensive than most Second Growths.

Re-assessing the classification

Naturally, some people have not taken this situation lying down, and they have done something about developing a ranking and classification that has a bit more contemporary relevance.

To re-assess the classification, in the modern world, the simplest thing to do would be to throw the whole thing out and start again. The obvious way to do this would be to create a new classification based on current wine prices, since this was the method originally used by the Bordeaux wine brokers in 1855. However, this is confounded by the fact that the current prices are influenced by the 1855 classification in the first place! So, many modern wine commentators have not done this — they have simply modified the old classification in some subjective way of their own.

One important point to keep in mind is that classifications usually have arbitrary boundaries between the groups. In this case, wine quality varies continuously, and yet the châteaux have been arranged into discrete groups. To a great extent this is arbitrary, because the best wines in one group are not all that different from the worst wines in the next higher group. This has always been the fundamental limitation of any classification system. No-one wants to be the top château in class 3 instead of the bottom château in class 2!

Anyway, I have compiled the data from a number of modern rankings and classifications. These first ones are subjective re-classifications by wine experts (the list in intended to be exhaustive).

1. Alexis Lichine (1979) Guide to the Wines and Vineyards of France. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lichine’s classification was first published in 1962, and revised in 1966. Later revisions followed, until the last version was published in 1985, although the final classification was actually dated to 1978.
2. Patrick Dussert-Gerber (1988) Guide des Vins de France 1989. Paris: Albin Michel.
3. Robert M. Parker (1990) Les Vins de Bordeaux. Paris: Solar.
4. Clive Coates (1995) Grands Vins: the Finest Châteaux of Bordeaux and their Wines. University of California Press, Berkeley. This classification has only four groups, not five, and first appeared in 1982. A later classification has only three groups.

The next group consists of attempts to rank the châteaux anew, in their modern context, without direct reference to 1855. In all cases, the rankings are derived from a calculated score of some sort. In each case I have grouped the rankings into five classes, based on gaps in the scores at appropriate spots.

1. Gary M. Thompson and Stephen A. Mutkoski (2011) Reconsidering the 1855 Bordeaux classification of the Médoc and Graves using wine ratings from 1970-2005. Journal of Wine Economics 6: 15-36. The list was based on the quality scores from three expert wine ratings (Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, International Wine Cellar). The châteaux ranking was then derived from a regression analysis incorporating a number of relevant factors.
2. Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh (1996) Pricing red wines of Médoc vintages from 1949 to 1989 at Christie's auctions. Journal de la Société Statistique de Paris 137: 19-49. Based on auction sales prices from 1980–1992. The châteaux ranking was derived from a regression analysis incorporating a number of relevant factors.
3. (a) Orley Ashenfelter (1988) A new and objective ranking of the chateaux of Bordeaux (based on auction prices, of course!). Liquid Assets 5: 1–9. (b) Orley Ashenfelter (1997) A new objective ranking of the chateaux of Bordeaux. Liquid Assets 13: 1-6. These two lists were based on average auction sale prices from 1985–1988 and 1994–1996, respectively. I averaged the two listed scores for each château.
4. The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 Index tracks the trading-exchange prices of 100 top wines (95% of which are from Bordeaux). Rankings of the Bordeaux châteaux, based on average prices over the previous 2-5 years, were produced in 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. I have taken the average of these list prices. Sadly, the 2017 list has only 48 châteaux, not 60, with only five 5th growths listed — the text says “5eme – £250 to £312” but the list has nothing < £274.

A comparison of these classifications

For my data analysis in this post, I have restricted myself to the 5-class classification rather than the châteaux rankings, so that the scale for each château is 1-5 for each of the eight new classifications. There are missing data, because not all of the châteaux were classified by all of the authors.

As I have done for previous posts of this type, I have used a network to visualize the data, with the network being used as a form of exploratory data analysis. This is intended to provide a quick visual overview of the relationships among the classifications.

Technical note. I first used the gower similarity to calculate the similarity of the different classification systems, based on the châteaux classes. This was followed by a neighbor-net analysis to display the between-classification similarities as a phylogenetic network. More information about interpreting these networks can be found at my post: How to interpret splits graphs.

The network for the eight classifications is shown in the graph. Each classification scheme is represented by a dot in the network. Schemes that are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on their grouping of the various châteaux, and those that are further apart (as measured along the lines) are progressively more different from each other.

The first thing to note is that there are long terminal lines for most of the classifications, with only relatively small edges connecting to each other in the center of the network. This emphasizes that each classification has its own unique features, and that they actually share relatively little in common. Indeed, even a quick look at the data shows that the classifications really only agree on the First and Second Growth châteaux — below that in the ranking, it is a bit of a free-for-all. This lack of uniformity between the classifications makes wine classification look distinctly more like an art than a science.

Anyway, the “spider-web” of lines in the center of the network does, indeed, tell us some things.

First, the Ashenfelter and Vittorio classifications are the most similar in the network. This is not unexpected, because they were based on auction prices over roughly the same periods of time.

The Dussert-Gerber classification has some things in common with both the Parker and the Coates classifications, but apparently somewhat different things. These are subjective classifications, remember.

The Thompson and Liv-ex classifications also share some things in common, which may seem a bit odd, since they are based on different criteria (quality scores versus prices, respectively). However, the other auction-price-based classifications (Ashenfelter and Vittorio) come from a couple of decades earlier than the Liv-ex prices, which presumably accounts for its distinction from them.

Finally, all of the classifications are very different from them 1855 one, but the two classifications that share the most with it are the ones from Lichine and Liv-ex, with Lichine’s actually being slightly closer. This was Lichine’s stated objective: a marriage of the old and the new. He seems to have achieved that; but more recent classifiers think that the Bordeaux classification needs more radical re-arrangement.

Conclusion

In this post, I have restricted myself to the classification — that is, the five groups. However, the original 1855 list was also a ranking, and many of the modern re-assessments also provide ranks. This may actually be more relevant to modern wine drinkers than are the groupings, and so I will look at these rankings in a future post.

Wine descriptions are related to perceived wine quality

One does not have to spend more than a few seconds reading wine writing to realize that this is not normal human discourse. The writing style used for descriptions of wine seems to cover the full gamut of human expression with the sole exception of normalcy. That is, it covers hyperbole, flowery, literary, allusive, obscure, flamboyant, and sometimes (sadly) even pretentious.

If you want a good laugh, then plenty of people have ridiculed the style of wine descriptions, in everything from books to cartoons. You could try The Complete Guide to Wine Snobbery, if you want a well-written and educational introduction to the topic (by a New York children's-wear manufacturer co-incidentally named Leonard Bernstein); or if you want a rough-around-the-edges look at the topic then try The Illustrated Winespeak (by cartoonist Ronald Searle).

Way back in 2007, Mike Steinberger wrote about Why wine writers talk that way. He started by quoting Fran Lebowitz (well-known for “her sardonic social commentary on American life”), to the effect that: “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.” Steinberger was not impressed with where this must leave people who talk about wine writing.

Well, I have been interested to write a data-analysis blog post about wine words, and wondered how I might do it, while simultaneously avoiding Ms. Lebowitz's sharp tongue. I stopped worrying about it when I realized that someone had already done it for me, and so I could hide behind him, instead.

The basic idea is that there are often commentaries to the effect that the modern idea of giving wines a quality score may not be the best way to discuss wine, and that the descriptions are better. This leads to the obvious query about whether the points and words are actually related.

This has been looked at by Olivier Goutay (2018): Wine ratings prediction using machine learning. He studied the online wine reviews from Wine Enthusiast for the years 1999–2017, totaling c. 92,400 unique wine reviews. The data of interest, for each wine, concern the quality score reported plus the word description.

The first thing he notes about the relationship of points and descriptions is that the higher the points the longer the description. This is shown in the graph here, reproduced from the original.

The quality points are shown horizontally, and each score has a separate box-and-whisker plot above it, showing how long are the descriptions (ie. the number of words). The boxed area shows the range for the middle 50% of the description lengths, with the horizontal center-line indicating the median (50% of the lengths are above the median and 50% below). The vertical line (whisker) on each side of the box indicates the range of most of the rest of the lengths. However, unusual (outlying) values are shown by individual symbols.

The lengths of the descriptions increase continuously from 80 to 95 points, more than doubling from 15 words to 35. This is somewhat reassuring — higher points should indicate a better quality wine, which is then worth a few more words, showing appreciation. The lengths plateau after 95 points, which may also be reassuring — editors must realize that there should be a maximum length to wine descriptions! The sudden increase in length at 99 points (40 words) and 100 points (45 words) is not unexpected, I guess, as the writers wax lyrical about perfection.

Olivier Goutay's purpose in his data analysis was somewhat more ambitious than this: Is it possible, through the computer technique called machine learning, to predict a wine rating (in points) based on its word description? Technically, this is a type of text analysis, sometimes called sentiment analysis.

He concludes that it is possible to produce a very good prediction, at about 97% precision. I will not bore you with the details, which you can read for yourself by checking out the original. However, it should be obvious from the above graph that simply counting the number of words in a Wine Enthusiast description will allow you to work out the number of points pretty accurately, at least up to a score of 95.

As a last point, we might leave the final word to Jon Cohen, who, when describing wine descriptions (Jabberwiney, 2000), noted: “Why do these people write this way? Is this what happens when your job requires you to drink before noon?”