Wine quality ratings versus price in the Wine Enthusiast Magazine

Abstract

Do more expensive wines taste better? This question has been addressed frequently and is of greatest relevance, given the enormous number of wines in the market and the broad range of prices at they are sold. Consumers often rely on wine guides, on paper or on line to make buying decisions, based on - along other factors, like origin and grape variety - the quality ratings given by experts and the reference prices they find there. Some researchers, like Schamel and Anderson , found a positive relationship between the quality ratings reported in these guides and the wines` prices. In this study, we used a large data set scraped from the Wine Enthusiast Magazine to access the relationship between prices and quality ratings for wines from different countries, trying to find in what measure the consumer can buy high quality wines spending little money. that all the countries have quality ratings with reasonable variability but with similar medians comprised between 85 and 90. Prices, have great variability at the top level, but the median falls, for all countries, in the range of 14 to 28$. When we plot the aggregated quality ratings for all the 10 countries as the dependent variable of price, we find initially a moderate positive relationship between prices and ratings (R = 0.55, p < 2.2 x 10-16) that, around the 200$ price, changes to a plateau with a very gentle ascent (R = 0.21, p < 1.4 x 10-9). Breaking those results for each country we see that for extreme prices, in some countries like US, Italy, Austria and Portugal (but not France) an increase in price tents to have a negative relationship with the ratings. Looking more closely to the Portuguese wines, a local maximum can be detected around 100$ in the “Excellent” range of quality. This could work as a “sweet spot” price reference for the exigent (and wealthy) consumer. But less affluent consumers do not need to spend so much: you can find 148 Portuguese wines rated as “Excellent” between 7 and 15$. So, do more expensive wines taste better? For top rated wines (80 – 100) , generally yes, but not necessarily so.