The role of customer and expert ratings in a hedonic analysis of French red wine prices: from gurus to geeks?

ABSTRACT

Wine experts’ ratings provide quality information and reduce the information asymmetry for the consumer. We hypothesize that consumers’ ratings will come to dominate expert ratings in the wine expertise market. We employ a hedonic regression framework on the attributes of 36,970 French red wines to determine the relative impacts of expert and Vivino community ratings on wine prices. Average consumer ratings are found to have a larger effect on price than expert scores. These results are found to be robust to outliers and the general conclusion that peers matter more than experts holds when we exclude the top-end wines.

KEYWORDS:

• Hedonic analysis
• wine experts
• peer rating
• wine prices
• quality evaluation

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C01
• D12
• L66
• L15
• Q11

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Vivino for providing the dataset. We are particularly grateful to two anonymous referees and to participants at the European Association of Wine Economists, Vila Real, Portugal, May 2022.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ from Associazione Italiana Sommelier AIS, Seminario Veronelli, Gambero Rosso-Slow Food, and L’Espresso wine guides.

² Bourgogne is the only wine region in France whose name is translated into different languages (eg. Burgundy in English), the Bourgogne wine board (BIVB) recommends not to translate the word “Bourgogne” to ensure coherence between the wine labels and the name of the region where the wines were created. Source: https://www.bourgogne-wines.com.

³ The data upon which the findings of this study are based were obtained from Vivino. Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under licence for this study. Data are available on www.vivino.com with the permission of Vivino.