, Columnist
How to Judge a Wine Without Tasting It
An economist’s method predicts a vintage’s quality using only statistics. Why hasn’t it caught on?
Collector’s items.
Photographer: Jerome Favre/Bloomberg
This article is for subscribers only.
Before there was moneyball for baseball, there was moneyball for wine. And yet, unlike in baseball, the use of statistical analyses in the wine industry remains relatively rare. What explains the difference?
In the late 1980s, the Princeton economist Orley Ashenfelter found that he could predict the quality of Bordeaux red wine vintages based on characteristics such as the temperature and rainfall during the harvest year.