The preferences and prejudices of Australian wine critics

ABSTRACT

The paper demonstrates a method for identifying and measuring the preferences and prejudices of wine critics. Employing expert rating scores from four wine critics assessing Australian premium wines, the analysis further illustrates the significant variability which exists among expert quality scores. A mean pairwise correlation of 0.435, an intraclass correlation of 0.426 and an alpha reliability of 0.748 are identified for 258 commonly assessed wines. These measures of rater consensus are lower than those identified from other wine studies and in other disciplines. Regression models are developed to explain the difference between each specific expert score and the average score of the other experts. The models explain the specific preferences of wine critics employing information which is readily available to consumers. For different experts, the cellaring potential of a wine, its vintage, the source region of the grapes and the variety/style of the wine are found to explain wine preferences to different degrees. The presented information may usefully be employed by consumers when confronted with conflicting wine scores. To aid with purchasing wine products consumers may wish to align their preferences with the identified preferences of specific wine critics.

KEYWORDS:

• Expert rating scores
• wine preferences
• Australia

Acknowledgement

Comments from two anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The distinction between ordinal and interval scales is not always clear cut. For example, Cicchetti and Cicchetti (2009) suggest that ordinal scales containing seven or more categories can be effectively treated as interval data for analysis.

2. For a general discussion about rater agreement measures and alpha values, see Cicchetti (1994).

3. In this paper, we only have access to mean correlations from other studies and so use the standardised alpha as an approximation of internal consistency. For a discussion of the difference between the standardised and unstandardised alpha, see Falk and Savale (2011).

4. In general, there does not appear to be any significant, media, ‘blog’ or other commentary on the differences between Australian wine critics and their preferences.

5. The minimum scores for bronze models are: Halliday 86, Hooke 85, Geddes 84, while Oliver suggests a range of 84–86 being ‘just above and below bronze status’. Given the consistent show judging metric employed by raters then there is no pressing need to standardise rating scores for comparisons as is Cardebat and Paroissien (2015).

6. Cardebat and Livat (2016) do explicitly motivate their sample choice by focusing on 62 fine quality wines from 9 vintages, however not all wine/vintage combinations are assessed by any of the 4 raters.