Do eco-friendly wines taste better? (Yes, they do.)

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http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/do-eco-friendly-wines-taste-better

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Do eco-friendly wines taste better?[/font]

[font size=4]Raise a glass to organic grapes: UCLA study finds eco-certified wine rated higher by wine publications[/font]

Alison Hewitt | August 02, 2016

[font size=3]It’s time to toast environmentally friendly grapes. A new UCLA study shows that eco-certified wine tastes better — and making the choice even easier, earlier research shows it’s often cheaper, too.

Though consumers remain reluctant to spend more on wine from organic grapes, the new study from UCLA researchers shows that in blind taste-tests professional wine reviewers give eco-certified wines higher ratings than regular wines.

The study, published today in the Journal of Wine Economics, looked at reviews and scores for more than 74,000 California wines from the magazines Wine Advocate, Wine Enthusiast and Wine Spectator. On a standardized 100-point scale, eco-certified wines scored an average of 4.1 points higher. The standardized scale controlled for differences between the scoring systems — for example, easy graders versus hard graders.

“The bottom line is that however we look at it, we find that organic and biodynamic farming has these small but significant positive effects on wine quality,” said lead author Magali Delmas, a UCLA environmental economist and professor in the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

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2. From the study

https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=10439491&fileId=S1931436116000146

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The growing demand for environmentally sustainable products has created a boom in the field of green products. For instance, sales of organic foods in the U.S. increased from $13.3 billion in 2005 to an estimated $34.8 billion in 2014. The wine industry is no exception: the number of ecocertified Californian wine operations in our data increased from 10 in 1998 to 57 in 2009. However, little consensus exists as to whether ecocertified wines are actually better than their conventional counterparts, making winemakers hesitant to seek certification. Although the literature shows that ecocertified (though not ecolabeled) wines command a price premium over traditional wines, no attempt has been made to test whether they are actually of higher quality (Delmas and Grant, 2014). This study seeks to answer the question, is ecocertification associated with quality? The wine market is especially suited to an investigation of the connection between ecocertification and quality; unlike many products of agriculture, wine is a highly differentiated good for which quality ratings are published monthly. This allows us to control for a broad range of characteristics such as vintage, varietal, and region in order to isolate the effect of ecocertification on quality. We use data from three leading wine-rating publications (the Wine Advocate {WA}, Wine Spectator {WS}, and Wine Enthusiast {WE}) to assess quality of 74,148 wines produced in California between 1998 and 2009. Scores are important as they can influence the price of wines. For instance, research (e.g., Cardebat, Figuet, and Paroissien, 2014; Masset, Weisskopf, and Cossutta, 2015) has found that higher expert scores have a significant impact on wine prices, and, in a meta-analysis, Oczkowski and Doucouliagos (2015) found a positive correlation of 0.30 between score and price. Recent research indicates a moderately high level of consensus among these wine publications (Stuen, Miller, and Stone, 2015). In addition, we use data on two types of ecocertification, organic and biodynamic. We obtain ecocertification information from California Certified Organic Farmers and Demeter Association.

Our results indicate that the adoption of wine ecocertification has a statistically significant and positive effect on wine ratings. These results are interesting because they contradict the general sentiment that ecolabeled wines are of lower quality— the reason that two-thirds of California wineries that adopt ecocertification do not put the ecolabel on their bottles (Delmas and Grant, 2014). This contradiction could indicate a failure of the current ecolabel to effectively convey the quality of ecocertified wines.

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4. “…there is a direct correlation between wine quality and price…”

As a bit of an oenophile myself, I must disagree.

A number of times over the years, I have found some very good wine which is a bargain, only to watch its price rise, as others discovered it. The price doesn’t rise because they’re using better grapes, or they’ve moved the winery. The price goes up because it can.

There is a tendency for higher priced wines to “taste better,” because they are higher priced. (This is not to deny that producing a better wine typically costs more.)

http://www.caltech.edu/news/wine-study-shows-price-influences-perception-1374

[font face=Serif]01/14/2008
[font size=5]Wine Study Shows Price Influences Perception[/font]

[font size=3]PASADENA, Calif.-- A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but slap on a hefty price tag, and our opinion of it might go through the roof. At least that's the case with the taste of wine, say scientists from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University.

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Rangel and his colleagues had 20 volunteers taste five wine samples which, they were told, were identified by their different retail prices: $5, $10, $35, $45, and $90 per bottle. While the subjects tasted and evaluated the wines, their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

The subjects consistently reported that they liked the taste of the $90 bottle better than the $5 one, and the $45 bottle better than the $35 one. Scans of their brains supported their subjective reports; a region of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, or mOFC, showed higher activity when the subjects drank the wines they said were more pleasurable.

There was a catch to the experiment, however. Although the subjects had been told that they would taste five different, variously priced wines, they actually had sampled only three. Wines 1 and 2 were used twice, but labeled with two different prices. For example, wine 2 was presented as the $90 wine (its actual retail price) and also as the $10 wine. When the subjects were told the wine cost $90 a bottle, they loved it; at $10 a bottle, not so much. In a follow-up experiment, the subjects again tasted all five wine samples, but without any price information; this time, they rated the cheapest wine as their most preferred.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0706929105

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6. “…the most expensive wines are the most elite and small production wines…”

(Agreed.)