Felix Salmon

Eric Arnold reports back from a blind-tasting wine stunt:

This fall, at New York restaurant Eleven Madison, six top pinot noirs from California, Oregon and Burgundy (the most expensive of which was $425 per bottle) were served blind alongside six of Craggy Range’s pinots. The two dozen or so tasters were asked to guess where each wine was from, then rank them on taste from one to 12.

None were particularly good at guessing each wine’s origin (I got four of the 12 correct), indicating that all the wines were made very well (for example, there was no stereotyping of all California pinots as tasting like this or New Zealand ones smelling like that). But in the final scoring, an average among all the tasters’ scores, Craggy Range dominated, claiming tasting spots one through five. Its sixth entry came in eighth place.

A similar thing occurred at a tasting, a few weeks prior, for several critics and writers in San Francisco. There, Craggy Range’s Bordeaux-style merlot, called Sophia ($50), bested a range of top Bordeaux wines as well as some other entries from New Zealand. The Château Mouton-Rothschild Pauillac 2006 ($695) landed in 11th place out of 12.

It seems that the Craggy Range owners have cracked the blind-tasting code, and are using it to their great advantage. Arnold says, correctly, that the results of blind tastings are “notoriously inconsistent” — but you can be sure that the results of this tasting weren’t down to blind luck, or Craggy Range would never have gone to the expense of mounting it.

The first trick that Craggy Range uses is to put its wines, which are made for drinking immediately, up against very young French wines which are made to be cellared for many years. That’s an invidious comparison, and it basically means that the tasters at these events are being asked to compare, on an apples-to-apples basis, wines which are drinking well now with wines which will taste much better in a decade’s time. That’s a bit silly.

The second trick, I suspect (and I haven’t tasted Craggy Range wines, so I don’t know for sure) is that the Kiwi contingent is simply sweeter and fruitier than the wines it was put up against. Here’s what I wrote back in September:

When I did a blind tasting of Pinot Noirs a couple of years ago, I got really excited about the eventual winner, the 2005 Heron. I ended up buying quite a lot of it, and sometimes ordering it in restaurants or bars as well, and, weirdly for a wine which everybody thought was spectacularly good, it didn’t grow on me at all — quite the opposite.

Part of that is maybe just that most wine deteriorates with age, and that the ‘05 was better when we first tasted it than when I drank it a year or more later. But another part of it, I think, is that the kind of wines one loves in blind tastings are not necessarily the kind of wines one actually likes to drink in real life. As Bob says, they tend to the soft, and fruity, and sweet. If you normally like that sort of thing, then great, but if you tend to prefer something a bit more austere or elegant, then you might well end up doing yourself no favors at all if you taste a lot of wines blind.

Craggy Range, here, is taking its New World winemaking skills and then comparing them in a blind taste test with the very epitome of austere and elegant wines: expensive Burgundies. It’s then giving that test to wine snobs — people who like to think that they have outgrown a childish love of sweetness, and have moved on to appreciate the finer things in life. But the fact is that blind tastings are a really bad way of appreciating a fine wine. (The best way, of course, is to drink it with great food and great company.)

The Wine Spectator’s Thomas Matthews left a comment on that blog entry, saying that “good judges know that the ‘immediate gratifications’ of, say, residual sugar and high alcohol are not necessarily indicators of underlying quality” — to which I can only say that although they might know that in theory, they’re pretty predictable when it comes to forgetting it in practice. And I suspect that Craggy Range is cunningly taking advantage of exactly that disconnect.

At least between, say, $3 and $6 per bottle:

Supplying wine to sell at $5, $4, $3 or even two bucks per bottle is not that difficult once you set out to do it. Cheap surplus grapes, cheap surplus wines, low-cost winemaking processes and economies of scale all contribute to extreme value supply. Nope, supply is easy. The challenge, until recently at least, has been selling the stuff.

Studies have repeatedly shown that wine drinkers are influenced by price – but not in the way you learned in Econ 101. A lower price does not always produce more sales because insecure buyers infer quality from price. They assume that higher price means better wine.

I’d like to see some empirical data here, but intuitively it’s at least possible that raising a wine from $3 to $6 per bottle might increase rather than decrease sales. That seems to be changing, as Mike Veseth explains in the rest of the article. But let’s say it holds true here, or once did. This isn’t a case of Veblen goods: drinking a $6 bottle of wine hardly counts as conspicuous consumption. Is there a name for this phenomenon? And is it found elsewhere?

Update: “Fred Engels“, in the comments, makes the excellent point that there’s another place this phenomenon is often found: the stock market, where demand often rises as the price of a stock goes up.

How many people, when looking at a wine list, would spend $80 on a timorasso, or $90 for sagrantino? (No, I’ve never heard of them either.) According to Stephen Mancini, the 28-year-old wine director for Union Square Cafe, as channeled by Ryan Flinn, it’s a sizeable number: “drinkers are apt to try something they’ve never heard of if it’s less than $100″.

It’s good news that wine drinkers and restaurant goers are adventurous, of course. But is $100 really a “worth a try to see what it’s like” price point these days?

Spending a couple of high-intensity days in Washington, as I’ve just done, is enough to send anybody dreaming of booze. And so it’s quite lovely to read Dr Vino’s missive from the latest Executive Wine Seminar, which featured not only 15 spectacular 2005 Bordeaux wines, but also Robert Parker, tasting them blind.

Parker has rated all these wines, of course. But would his blind ranking bear much if any relation to his official ranking? And how many of the wines could he successfully identify? The answers, I wasn’t at all surprised to hear, were “no”, and “zero”.

To take just one example, Parker identified wine #8, the mainly-Merlot L’Eglise Clinet from Pomerol, as being the mainly-Cabernet Cos d’Estournel from Saint-Estèphe.

Writes Dr Vino, charitably:

A final issue is about points and the nature of blind tasting, a capricious undertaking if there ever were one. Although Parker did not rate the wines yesterday, his top wine of the evening (Le Gay) was the lowest rated in the lineup from his most recent published reviews… For all the precision that a point score implies, it is not dynamic, changing with the wines as they change in the bottle nor does it capture performance from one tasting to the next.

So should we do away with blind tasting altogether? Tom Matthews, the executive editor of Wine Spectator, wrote this on my blog:

Blind tasting is not easy, but that does not mean it’s not useful. With all due respect to Bob Millman, it’s not that tasting blind is “judging from ignorance”; it’s that ignorant judges do poorly in blind tastings.

Millman is the person who runs the Executive Wine Seminar tastings, and he’s much less constructive on the subject of blind tastings than Matthews, and it’s not hard to see why: after all, it does rather seem as though Matthews is saying that Parker is an ignorant judge.

Parker isn’t an ignorant judge, of course. And I daresay he actually did well in this tasting, in terms of judging the wines purely as he was drinking them. He just did badly in terms of identifying what they were, or giving them this time around the same ranking that they got the last time he ranked them. Wine is not a fungible commodity, where one bottle is always the same as the next — quite the opposite. But the fact that wine changes, from bottle to bottle and from month to month, rather defeats the purpose of magazines such as Wine Spectator.

I asked Matthews what he considered a “good judge” to be, and whether there were any downsides to tasting blind. He wrote back:

On judges: Yes, in my opinion, judgment is a quality that lies along a spectrum. “Ignorant” judges lack the context to make useful distinctions; “good” judges have enough experience and understanding to apply appropriate criteria to the wine in the glass. All judges begin in ignorance. If they work hard — taste widely, concentrate intently, read and travel and interview the experts — they may become good. At Wine Spectator, it’s less a matter of “choosing” judges than training them. Before an editor qualifies as a wine critic, he or she undergoes a long and intensive period of apprenticeship with us. The “empirical data” we look for is their consistency of judgment, breadth of understanding and sensitivity to the qualities of the wines they are tasting (faults, structure, flavor descriptors, etc.) Once they do qualify, they are given responsibilty for specific wine types, and as they prove their consistency and expertise, they take on larger tasting beats.

On “downsides”: The challenge in evaluating wine is eliminating externalities that can bias judgment (such as price and reputation) without eliminating so much context that judgment is impossible (since good wine is supposed to reflect its vintage, terroir, etc). Carefully-calibrated single-blind tasting is the methodology that long experience has convinced us is the best and fairest approach. But enjoying wine is a different matter, and in that situation, blind tasting can rob us of information that can supply both pleasure and edification. At dinner parties, I like to serve a wine blind, to get an “unbiased” reaction, then unveil it, so we can learn both from our reactions, and from the wine.

In a world where Robert Parker fails to perform on the criterion of “consistency of judgment”, even in the context of a “carefully-calibrated single-blind tasting”, this does ring a little hollow. Parker didn’t invent the guess-this-wine game that many tastings become, but he is partly responsible for the idea that people who are good at that game are necessarily the people best qualified to judge wine. It’s definitely fun to see him hoist on his own petard once in a while.

Mike Veseth reprints the most depressing list I’ve seen in a long time:

The top ten individual wines (by volume not value of sales) in 2008 were (drum roll) …

1. Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay
2. Cavit Pinot Grigio
3. Beringer White Zinfandel
4. Sutter Home White Zin
5. Inglenook Chablis
6. Ecco Domani Pinot Grigio
7. Mezzacorona Pinot Grigio
8. Copper Ridge Chardonnay
9. Yellow Tail Chardonnay
10. Franzia White Zin

The top-volume wines are always, by definition, going to be mass-produced wines. But that doesn’t mean that every single one has to be white (or the abomination known as “White Zinfandel”, which is basically wine for people who think that Yellow Tail Chardonnay is too dry).

Franzia White Zin retails for as little as $13.11 for a 5-liter box; if you assume the wholesale price is say $12, and assume 125ml glasses of wine, that puts the cost to the restaurant of a glass of wine at just 30 cents. You can see why restaurants would be keen to push this stuff. And you can also see why any self-respecting diner would rather stick to Budweiser.

I got a wonderful email from Bob Millman, of Executive Wine Seminars, on Wednesday, and I knew I had to meet him, so I did just that, this evening*. Bob’s been running blind wine tastings for decades now, and so he knows just what they’re good for and also what they’re really bad at. Here’s a bit of what he wrote to me:

It should be obvious to any thinking person that blind tastings necessarily favor–on a group vote basis–wines which offer immediate pleasure and gratification. Left to their undirected devices, the senses will almost always gravitate to the obvious and miss the subtle. I have fallen victim to the sweeter-is-better trap several times myself. At blind tastings that include left bank and right bank young Bordeaux, the right bank wines almost always garner higher scores from the crowd. Young Merlot simply tastes “better” than young Cabernet Sauvignon. Softer, sweeter, more flattering.

When I did a blind tasting of Pinot Noirs a couple of years ago, I got really excited about the eventual winner, the 2005 Heron. I ended up buying quite a lot of it, and sometimes ordering it in restaurants or bars as well, and, weirdly for a wine which everybody thought was spectacularly good, it didn’t grow on me at all — quite the opposite.

Part of that is maybe just that most wine deteriorates with age, and that the ’05 was better when we first tasted it than when I drank it a year or more later. But another part of it, I think, is that the kind of wines one loves in blind tastings are not necessarily the kind of wines one actually likes to drink in real life. As Bob says, they tend to the soft, and fruity, and sweet. If you normally like that sort of thing, then great, but if you tend to prefer something a bit more austere or elegant, then you might well end up doing yourself no favors at all if you taste a lot of wines blind.

This evening, Bob ordered a gorgeous terroir-based Beaujolais, after which we moved on to a big Californian old-vine Zinfandel. We both preferred the old-world wine, but as Bob said, if you put the two next to each other in a blind tasting, there’s no doubt which would win. In contemporary art terms, it would be a bit like exhibiting Fred Sandback next to Jeff Koons. Even when you’re tasting like against like — for instance, when you’re tasting young Bordeaux — you’re just as likely to steer yourself wrong by tasting blind as you are to find a hidden gem, since the best Bordeaux wines just don’t do very much when they’re young.

“The problem with blind tasting is that you’re working from a position of ignorance,” said Bob. If you know exactly what it is that you’re tasting — a young first-growth wine, for example — then you can taste it in that light. Similarly, if you know that you’re looking at an Ad Reinhardt painting, you’ll be willing to spend a few minutes with it so that you can appreciate its subtleties. If you didn’t know it was a Reinhardt, then you’d probably just read it as a black monochrome and move on. Or think about someone like Joseph Beuys: the whole point of the art is that it’s multi-layered, and responds slowly to the viewer, who has to think things through.

Much wine — and most great wine — is similar: it grows on you, slowly. But in the artificial environment of a blind tasting, where you’re running through a dozen or more wines, it’s impossible for the vast majority of us to do such wines justice. Hell, its hard enough to do even one bottle of great wine justice: while every so often, while you’re drinking a bottle, it all comes together spectacularly, there will also always be times when you take a sip absentmindedly between bites and miss a lot of the beauty and flavor.

On top of that, blind tastings by their nature become guessing games, and the people doing the tasting, rather than simply approaching each wine with an open mind, are constantly asking themselves which wine it might be, whether it’s famous, or expensive, or maybe even the one that they brought to the tasting. Such thoughts are not conducive to the appreciation of great wine, just as someone looking to see whether a painting was genuine or not is likely to miss out, while doing so, on much of its aesthetic appeal.

In any case, the various different factors which go into the enjoyment of a wine are so multitudinous that when you try to eradicate them all in order to allow different wines to compete on a level playing field, you at the same time eradicate much of what makes a wine so enjoyable in the first place. You might love your spouse’s [insert body part here], but it would be pointless and invidious for someone to test that love by presenting you with a series of carefully anonymized body parts and asking you which one you liked the most.

On my first anniversary, my wife and I drank a spectacular bottle of wine which was given to us as a wedding present by a good friend; what’s more, it came from the cellar of a wonderful restaurant and we drank it at that selfsame restaurant, with delicious food and friendly service and in general everything going right. We’ll both remember that bottle for years, it was everything you could ever hope for from a wine, and more. That’s by far the best way to drink great wine: with good food, on a special occasion, with people you love, purely for enjoyment. If you take most of that away, and drink wine blind, surrounded by serious men spitting into buckets, you’re doing something qualitatively very different indeed. And it should come as no surprise that there might not be much if any correlation between how much you like a wine in the former context and how much you like it in the latter.

There’s also a pretty strong argument to be made that blind tastings are positively bad, harmful things: that the hot, sweet, oaked, fruit-forward, soft-tannined wines which tend to excel in blind tastings are precisely the wines that everybody in the world is trying to make right now. Blind tastings, in many ways, might well have caused the homogenization of global wine culture — something which pretty much all wine lovers abhor but which seems at the same time to be unstoppable. And they’ve done it through the mechanism of the 100-point tasting scale, as invented by Robert Parker.

Wines sell based on how many points they garner, and they garner points by being tasted, blind, by critics like Parker. It used to be that if one importer or wine merchant didn’t like your wine, another one would. Nowadays, it doesn’t matter what those individuals like personally: it matters what the blind tasters at the Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator like. And the importers and merchants flock to the high-point wines, because those are the wines that their customers want.

What is blind tasting good for? Well, for one thing it’s very good at showing how important knowledge of price, as opposed to price itself, is as a contributing factor to a wine’s perceived quality. If you know that a wine you’re drinking is expensive, you’ll probably like it much more. If you’re deceived into thinking that a wine is expensive (if someone poured Yellowtail into a Lafite bottle, say) you’ll like that much more, too. And if someone poured Lafite into a colorful screw-top bottle, you’d like it less.

When I say, then, that in wine there’s no correlation between price and quality, what I mean is that there’s no correlation between price and quality except for in the 99% of cases where in fact the correlation is very strong — the cases when you know, more or less, how expensive the wine you’re drinking is.

I’m trying to train myself out of that ingrained mindset, by drinking quite a lot of cheap wine and buying large quantities of the good stuff. And there really is a lot of good cheap wine out there. But I know that I do still have the same prejudices as everybody else, no matter how much I write about negative price-quality correlations. If I open a cheap bottle and I don’t think much of it at first, I’ll assume it’s not very good. On the other hand, if I open an expensive bottle and I don’t think much of it at first, I’ll let it breathe, I’ll revisit it later, I’ll try to see if I can discern some subtlety and sophistication which might not have been immediately apparent. And if I look hard enough, I’ll probably find it.

*Um, I mean yesterday evening. I wrote this on Friday, but finished it late, and for some weird reason my internet seems to go down every evening at about 10pm — it’s done it four nights in a row. I spent an hour on the phone to Time Warner tech support on Thursday night, to no avail, and they’re sending someone out on Tuesday morning, when the internet will probably be working fine. Any ideas what the problem might be? The internet doesn’t go down entirely — the lights on the cable modem are still right, and I can occasionally download emails or the Google home page (which takes literally minutes to load). But it’s unusable, and the signal, as seen by Time Warner’s techs, is all messed up.

Update: Thomas Matthews, the executive editor of Wine Spectator, leaves a comment defending blind tasting and saying that if you want to be objective about things, “there is no better methodology”. I agree. But I think that objectivity is overvalued sometimes, and in any case it’s important to be aware of the weaknesses of the blind-tasting methodology, even if you can’t come up with a better alternative.

Daniel Posner notes that Robert Parker himself rarely tastes wines blind any more — this is true, and I think does speak to the limitations of blind tasting.

And londenio draws the comparison between wine and cola: Pepsi generally wins in blind tastings, ‘cos it’s sweeter. But most people still prefer Coke.

I taped this bloggingheads conversation with James Kwak last week, a good time was had I think by both of us.

James would like to draw your attention to the discussion of wine at the end; he says that enjoying expensive wine when you know intellectually that there’s no correlation between price and quality is a bit like getting a placebo effect from a drug when you know it’s a placebo. He’s right — and I’d be very interested in seeing any empirical data on the placebo effect under just those conditions. Has anybody done such a study?

Bob Hodgson provides yet more evidence (abstract, full paper) that there’s really no such thing as “wine quality”, if you’re tasting blind:

An analysis of over 4000 wines entered in 13 U.S. wine competitions shows little concordance among the venues in awarding Gold medals… An analysis of the number of Gold medals received in multiple competitions indicates that the probability of winning a Gold medal at one competition is stochastically independent of the probability of receiving a Gold at another competition…

For the 375 wines entered in five competitions, one would expect by chance alone (for p = 0.09), 234 wines receiving no Golds, 116 receiving a Gold in just one competition, 23 receiving Golds in two competitions, two receiving Golds in three competitions and no wine receiving Golds in more than three competitions. The observed frequencies closely mirror these numbers.

The more I look at empirical studies such as this one, the more I’m convinced that if you’re tasting blind, there’s no correlation between perceived quality and just about anything. On the other hand, we almost never taste blind in real life — and when you know what you’re drinking, there’s are very strong correlations between perceived quality and lots of things, such as provenance, price, and even whether the wine has a screw cap or a cork.

Which is why it’s perfectly rational to order expensive wine in a restaurant: since you know what you’re drinking, and how much it costs, there’s a very good chance that you’ll enjoy the more expensive wine more and the less expensive wine less. If you tasted them blind, on the other hand, there would be no correlation there at all.

The New York Times needs all the revenue sources it can get right now, so it’s licensed its brand to the Global Wine Company and created the New York Times Wine Club. This is a good thing, and not only because it brings money into the NYT’s coffers: it’s also the first such wine club I’ve seen which works in a non-evil manner.

Yes, like other wine clubs, you can sign up to receive a shipment of wine every 1, 2, or 3 months. But unlike any other wine club I’ve seen, you can also simply order a single shipment of wine, without then having to opt out of getting future shipments automatically.

I have no idea whether these wines are any good, or worth the money. But I do know that any “club” which doesn’t try to lock you in to a subscription is breath of fresh air.

In the February 2008 edition of Robert Parker’s hugely influential Wine Advocate newsletter, critic Jay Miller gave a highly-coveted 96-point rating to a formerly pretty-much unknown Spanish red called Sierra Carche, a Monastrell-based wine from Jumilla. Given that most Americans — indeed, most wine drinkers — have never heard of either Monastrell or Jumilla, the rating was a huge boon for the wine, and directly resulted in at least one consumer, Robert Kenney, ordering several cases without having ever tasted the wine at first hand.

Dr Vino picks up the rest of the story at some length, but suffice to say that Kenney was disappointed in the wine he bought, Miller agreed with Kenney’s opinion, and the importer ended up emailing this note to Miller:

“We have had similar problems with this wine and had a meeting in March with the winery to find out what the problem is. There was clearly some substandard product shipped by the winery and we have had to take back a large chunk of this wine from the market because it was rejected by the trade. I apologize on behalf of the winery for this apparent bait and switch. Going forward we are searching for a different winery for this brand (owned by our UK partner Guy Anderson wines).”

Yep: “we are searching for a different winery for this brand”.

Conceptually, most of us are dimly aware that if we buy a big, mass-produced wine like Yellowtail or Jacob’s Creek, we’re not going to always get juice from the exact same vineyard. But Sierra Carche was different: the labels were individually numbered out of 16,000 bottles, it was getting rave reviews in Wine Advocate, and it was made from a mix of obscure grapes grown in an equally-obscure region of Spain. On its face, this was the antithesis of the kind of homogenization and globalization excoriated in Jonathan Nossiter’s documentary Mondovino.

It turns out, however, that the opposite is the case.

This was the first vintage of Sierra Carche, which is owned by Guy Anderson in the United Kingdom. Guy Anderson Wines describes its business: “As one of the UK’s leading brand creators, …. [w]e are constantly researching and learning what people look for when choosing a wine…. We have a strong track record of producing innovative new wine brands…. [B]rands created by Guy Anderson Wines such as Fat Bastard, Mad Dogs & Englishmen and Gran Familia have found success in markets around the world.”

Sierra Carche, in other words, is a brand dreamed up by a UK wine-branding agency. And when there were problems with the first vintage of the brand, they just decided to go to some other winery to make the second vintage of the same brand. Indeed, it’s still incredibly unclear where, exactly, the first vintage came from, or who the winemaker was, or even whether there was any particular winery at all involved in the production of this brand. More likely the brand was created in conjunction with the commercial arm of a group of wineries in southeastern Spain, who were looking for a way to move their juice.

Now I have no problem with foreign winemakers doing interesting things with grapes sourced cheaply from unfashionable regions. Indeed, one such wine won a Pinot contest I held at my house in 2007. But it did so honestly. Sierra Carche, by contrast, looked for all the world like a high-end wine lovingly crafted from local terroir by a dedicated Spanish winemaker, rather than a mixture of juices driven by second-guessing “what people look for when choosing a wine” and designed to be one of “a raft of wines available at your local store”.

Once you know that, the Wine Advocate’s 96-point rating becomes easier to understand: this wine was designed to get high ratings, because high ratings are the best possible driver of international sales. It had been, to use the wine-world term, “Parkerized”. And the importer will of course have done everything in his power to ensure that Parker’s critic drank the very best possible expression of the wine.

Parker has thousands of loyal followers, and if they want to go out and buy Parkerized wines, that’s entirely up to them. If the wines then turn out to be very different from what the critic tasted, that’s a genuine scandal. Guy Anderson Wines will go off and find “a different winery” for Sierra Carche, but will keep the brand, because that 96-point rating, even if it’s for an earlier vintage, is still a great way of making sales on later vintages. Consumers will assume there’s some kind of continuity there.

But many of them will also assume that Miller somehow stumbled across this gem from Spain, rather than thinking that they’re drinking an English brand, made from Spanish grapes, specifically designed to appeal to Miller’s palate. But that’s what a lot of winemaking is, these days. And it’s increasingly difficult to tell the difference between honest local wines, on the one hand, and Parkerized global brands, on the other.

Some good news is coming out of California:

Total U.S. wine sales rose about 5% in terms of volume in the first quarter from a year earlier, but wines priced at $25 a bottle and up fell about 12%, estimates Jon Fredrikson, an industry consultant with Gomberg, Frederikson & Associates in Woodside, Calif…

Price cuts are taking a heavy toll on wineries’ cash flows, and could make it difficult for them to raise prices in the future. “If you’re a $90 wine and all of a sudden you’re on the Internet at $50, how do you ever become a $90 wine again?” says Elliot Stern, chief operating officer of the Sorting Table, a Napa Valley-based wine distributor.

It’s long overdue that consumers of California wines — not least Californians themselves — became a bit price-conscious. The number of $90 California wines which are actually worth $90 on any kind of sensible global scale is minuscule: most $90 California wines were priced that high simply to stroke the winemaker’s ego and keep up with the winery next door. There’s also the fact that much California wine-growing land is astronomically expensive, or was; prices coming down on that front will also be a good thing.

What we’re seeing is some kind of two-way market finally asserting itself: volumes increasing, as Economics 101 suggests they should, as prices decline. Let’s hope this continues for a while.

From the WSJ wine column:

In the first four months of the year, Argentina’s imports rose yet another 31% by volume, overtaking imports from France, which dropped more than 8%.

The US now imports more Argentine wine than French wine? Wow. I haven’t been able to track down the figures — trade.gov is down all weekend for “scheduled maintenance” — but this is a huge development, I think, especially since French wines, for my money, have never been better value. But I generally stick to the southeast, which I guess never accounted for much in the way of French imports.

There’s certainly much more variety in French wines than in Argentine wines — but maybe that’s precisely why the Argies are doing so well: they’re becoming a known quantity, predictable in a way that French wines are not. But in any case, at the margin reduced demand for French wine means cheaper French wine, which is surely a good thing, while increased demand for Argentine wine doesn’t seem to have driven up the price of Malbec particularly, and good Malbec is becoming much easier to find, to boot. So I’m counting this as a welcome development on all fronts.

Incidentally, if you’re in New York on June 30, do come along to a wine contest I’m hosting down by South Street Seaport; it should generate some very interesting price/quality data. No Malbecs, though: this one’s white wine only.

As every financial journalist knows, if you talk to self-proclaimed experts at investing in some given asset class, those experts will always tell you that what you really need, if you want to invest in their asset class, is expertise. This is not helpful. But Brett Arends seems to have bought it, at least when it comes to wine:

You really need to know what you are doing. That’s true of any market, but probably more in wines, where expertise can be developed over decades, than in many others. The really smart money in the wine market is going to cream the dumb money.

The odd thing about this is that if any market has seen the dumb money cream the smart money, it’s the wine market.

By far the best-performing wines have been the big brand-name first-growth Bordeaux: Petrus, Lafite, Margaux, that sort of thing, especially from renowned vintages. Meanwhile, anybody trying to snap up undervalued wines or otherwise make some kind of relative-value play will have massively underperformed. Those fabulous wines from the south of France or Australia or Germany or Italy or Spain? That case of 1945 port? Your bottle of 1899 madeira? None of it has performed particularly well as an investment. And it turns out that the cult California cabernets can be rather more difficult to sell than you might think — assuming you were able to buy them in the first place.

Now there are good reasons not to buy wine as an investment, and Arends covers most of them. But if you are going to buy wine as an investment, it’s not at all obvious that expertise is going to help you.

From a paper by Johan Almenberg and Anna Dreber of the Stockholm School of Economics:

We designed an experiment that examines how knowledge about the price of a good, and the time at which the information is received, affects how the good is experienced… Disclosing the high price before tasting the wine produces considerably higher ratings, although only from women.

I’m not frankly a huge fan of this experiment: only two wines were used (a $5 wine and a $40 wine) and both were Portugese. I’m still pretty sure that men, if they’re presented with a very expensive wine from a region they respect (Bordeaux, say) will rate that wine much more highly than if they neither knew its provenance nor its price. Maybe the gender difference in this study was more a function of anti-Portugese snobbism in men than it was of price determining perception.

A loyal reader writes in with a curious request: he’s lost a bet, which requires him to cough up a bottle of wine that retails for more than $50. But he says he’s “not willing to pay it off honorably”, and is asking if there are any expensive wines with a Wine Spectator score of less than 60. Basically, he’s looking for the worst possible wine in that price range; he says “The wine has to be available either online or in most NY/PA/NJ stores.”

My gut feeling is that any number of Burgundies might fit the bill, or else — if the recipient is anything like me — a particularly sickly Riesling, or a sweet Champagne. Or maybe a high-end vintage white — a Sauvignon Blanc way past its sell-by date, perhaps.

In general, though, this isn’t an easy bet to pay off dishonorably, since expensive wines really do taste better just by dint of being expensive, so long as the person tasting them knows what they cost. In any case they can always be regifted in good conscience. If your friend hates the 17% ABV California fruit-bombs, I’m sure he’ll know someone who loves them. My gut feeling is that the best course of action is to look for a celebrity endorsement, ideally accompanied by a donation to charity. This would be perfect, but it’s too cheap, maybe it comes in a limited-edition magnum?