The wine delusion

tried, their inconsistent results didn’t seem to budge. They still voted to retain and eliminate
the same wines. Berdik (2012) confirms that even the small minority of consistent tasters
were often wildly inconsistent the next. Without expectations that are based on price, expert
palates seem lost. To a point where the State Fair organisers were compelled to post a
video interview titled, ‘Are Wine Competitions a Hoax?’ featuring its chief judge, G.M.
Pucilowski. It’s clear that the wine market conducts itself on methodologies that are neither
rigorous nor accurate (Goldstein, 2008). Two decades ago, the American economist Orley
Ashenfelter offered the wine market a compelling tool using the power of simple statistics
to outdo the world’s most accurate critics (Kahneman, 2011, p. 223). Ashenfelter came up
with a formula that could predict the future prices of wine based on data, not human
intuition. His formula was simple:
∆ price =
­12.15 + (β1 * Winter rainfall) + (β2 * Average summer temperature)
+ (β3 * Harvest rainfall) + (β4 * Age of Vintage)
It created an uproar in the wine market, with Robert Parker calling the economist ‘an
absolute total sham’ (New, 2013). Perhaps Parker and his fraternity were concerned with
the plight of the fancy world of wine ratings and its pricing should an economist’s formula
beat a critic’s intuition. Unfortunately for them, Ashenfelter’s formula turned out to be
extremely accurate (Kahneman, 2011, p. 224). Kahneman (2011) confirmed that the
correlation between its prediction and actual prices was above .90. Ashenfelter’s formula
found praise from the Nobel­prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (cited in New,
2013) who feels, ‘Whenever we can replace human judgement by a formula, we should at
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