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JWE Volume 12 | 2017 | No. 3

Journal of Wine Economics Volume 12 | 2017 | No. 3

Introduction to the Issue

Karl Storchmann
Pages: 219-220
Full Text PDF
Introduction

This issue of the Journal of Wine Economics opens with an outlook entitled “U.K. and Global Wine Markets by 2025, and Implications of Brexit” by Kym Anderson and Glyn Wittwer (Anderson and Wittwer, 2017). First, the authors use a model of the world’s wine markets to provide a prediction to 2025 without Brexit, which serves as a reference scenario. They then contrast this with forecasts assuming the occurrence of Brexit. In various scenarios they assume different changes in bilateral U.K. – E.U. tariffs, United Kingdom’s income growth and its currency exchange rates and compute their impact on the wine trade. “The results suggest that the impact outside the United Kingdom will be minor compared with other developments in the world’s wine markets. Inside the United Kingdom, however, the effect of Brexit on incomes and the British pound are likely to have non- trivial initial impacts on the domestic wine market and to be far more consequential than the direct impact of changes in bilateral tariffs.”

In “An Examination of Tail Dependence in Bordeaux Futures Prices and Parker Ratings” Don Cyr, Lester Kwong, and Ling Sun employ the copula-function meth- odology to analyze bivariate distribution nonlinearities of Bordeaux wine futures prices and Parker barrel. They find a significant nonlinear relationship characterized by significant positive tail dependence and a strong correlation between high ratings and high en primeur prices. However, the correlation between en primeur prices and Parker scores is much less pronounced elsewhere in the distribution of ratings.

Based on Robert Hodgson’s seminal papers that suggest that winning a gold model at a wine competition is greatly influenced by chance alone (Hodgson, 2008, 2009), Jeffrey Bodington develops a statistical framework for analyzing ran- domness in wine tasting (Bodington, 2017). In particular, he introduces a condi- tional-probability model that yields maximum-likelihood estimates of judges’ latent consensus, idiosyncratic, and random assignments of scores to wines. “Applying the notion of conditional probability may lead to better methods of assigning awards to entries in wine competitions and of assessing the capabilities of wine judges.”

In “Terroir in the New World: Hedonic Estimation of Vineyard Sale Prices in California,” Robin Cross, Andrew Plantinga and Robert Stavins analyze the value of terroir in California’s Napa and Sonoma Counties by drawing on data of vineyard sales between 1991 and 2007 (Cross, Plantinga, and Stavins, 2017). Similar to their prior paper on Oregon vineyard sales (Cross, Plantinga, and Stavins, 2011), they find

that both intrinsic site attributes and designated appellations influence vineyard prices. However, the appellation effect appears to be significantly stronger. “This finding indicates that terroir matters economically, even if the designated appella- tions have relatively less connection in reality with terroir.”

In the last paper of this issue, Jean-Marie Cardebat, Benoît Faye, Eric Le Fur, and Karl Storchmann analyze “The Law of One Price? Price Dispersion on the Auction Market for Fine Wine” (Cardebat, et al., 2017). They draw on auction prices from eight auction houses at various locations worldwide covering the period from 2000 to 2012. A hedonic model reveals the existence of significant price premiums in par- ticular in Hong Kong and price differences between auction companies, independent of location. These premiums by far exceed the expected transaction costs casting doubt on the existence of the strong version of the LOOP in the fine wine market. “Our results suggest that heterogeneity in buyer preferences may crucially contribute to the observed price dispersion. In particular, while counterfeit suspect wines are sold at discounts in western markets, they fetch price premiums in Hong Kong.”

Karl Storchmann
New York University

U.K. and Global Wine Markets by 2025, and Implications of Brexit

Kym Anderson & Glyn Wittwer
Pages: 221-251
Full Text PDF
Abstract

The United Kingdom has accounted for a major share of the world’s wine imports for centuries, and wine accounts for more than one-third of U.K. alcohol consumption. It is therefore not sur- prising that suppliers of those imports and U.K. wine consumers, producers, traders, distributors, and retailers are focusing on what the United Kingdom’s planned withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit) might mean for them. In this paper, a model of the world’s wine markets is used to project those markets to 2025 without, and then with, the occurrence of Brexit. The Brexit sce- narios involve adjustment not just to U.K. and EU27 (the countries remaining in the European Union) bilateral tariffs but also to assumed changes to the United Kingdom’s income growth and currency. The relative importance of each of these three components of the initial shock are reported, as are impacts on bilateral wine-trade values and volumes for still and sparkling wines. The results suggest that the impact outside the United Kingdom will be minor compared with other developments in the world’s wine markets. Inside the United Kingdom, however, the effect of Brexit on incomes and the British pound are likely to have nontrivial initial impacts on the domestic wine market and to be far more consequential than the direct impact of changes in bilateral tariffs.

An Examination of Tail Dependence in Bordeaux Futures Prices and Parker Ratings

Don Cyr, Lester Kwong & Ling Sun
Pages: 252-266
Abstract

This paper explores the nonlinearities of the bivariate distribution of Bordeaux en primeur, or wine futures, prices and Parker “barrel ratings” for the period of 2004 through 2010. In partic- ular, copula-function methodology is introduced and employed to examine the nature of the bivariate distribution. Our results show a significant nonlinear relationship between Parker ratings and wine prices, characterized by significant positive tail dependence and higher correlation between high ratings and high prices. Marginal distributions for Parker ratings and wine prices are then identified and Monte Carlo simulation is employed to operationalize the relationship for risk-management purposes.

Disentangling Wine Judges’ Consensus, Idiosyncratic, and Random Expressions of Quality or Preference

Jeffrey C. Bodington
Pages: 267-281
Abstract

Judges confer various awards on wines entered in dozens of wine competitions each year. This article employs data on blind replicates to show that those awards are based on one instance of stochastic ratings assigned by wine judges; awards based on the expected values of those sto- chastic ratings would be different. This article recognizes the stochastic nature of ratings and builds on the work of many others to propose and test a conditional-probability model that yields maximum-likelihood estimates of judges’ latent consensus, idiosyncratic, and random assignments of scores to wines. The exact p-value for a likelihood test of the null hypothesis that the model’s results are random is less than 0.001. Applying the notion of conditional prob- ability may lead to better methods of assigning awards to entries in wine competitions and of assessing the capabilities of wine judges.

Terroir in the New World: Hedonic Estimation of Vineyard Sale Prices in California

Robin Cross, Andrew J. Plantinga & Robert N. Stavins
Pages: 282-301
Full Text PDF
Abstract

In the Old-World vineyards of Europe, a key concept that plays an important role in the pro- duction and appreciation of wines is terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We examine whether terroir matters in the New-World wines produced in California’s Napa and Sonoma Counties by conducting a hedonic price analysis of vineyard sales over the period 1991 to 2007 to determine the relative effects on vineyard sales prices of designated appellations versus biophysical site attributes commonly associated with terroir, such as slope, aspect, elevation, and climate. Because vine- yards that are sold are not necessarily representative of the universe of vineyards, we employ Heckman’s two-stage econometric approach to control for possible sample-selection bias. We find that intrinsic site attributes and designated appellations influence vineyard prices, although our results are stronger and more consistent with regard to the influence of appella- tions. This finding indicates that terroir matters economically, even if the designated appella- tions have relatively less connection in reality with terroir.

The Law of One Price? Price Dispersion on the Auction Market for Fine Wine

Jean-Marie Cardebat, Benoît Faye, Eric Le Fur & Karl Storchmann
Pages: 302-311
Abstract

This paper examines the strong version of the law of one price (LOOP) on the auction market for fine wine. We draw on worldwide auction prices from eight auction houses,1 covering the time period from 2000 to 2012. Employing a hedonic approach, we find signifi- cant price premiums in particular in Hong Kong and between auction companies (independent of their locations). The price premiums by far exceed the expected transaction costs, casting doubt on the existence of the strong version of LOOP in the fine wine market. Our results suggest that heterogeneity in buyer preferences may crucially contribute to the observed price dispersion. In particular, although wines suspected of being counterfeits are sold at discounts in Western markets, they fetch price premiums in Hong Kong.

Book & Film Reviews

Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine

By: Gordon M. Shepherd
Reviewer: Neal D. Hulkower
Pages: 332-334
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Let’s start at the end where it all began. In 2003, Yale School of Medicine professor of neuroscience Gordon Shepherd was invited to a private tasting with Jean-Claude Berrouet at the headquarters of Château Pétrus, the crown jewel of the Pomerol Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) on the Right Bank in the Bordeaux region. Berrouet, at the time the chief wine maker and technical director, assembled ten bottles from four vintages ranging from one to thirteen years old to tutor his guest in wine evaluation. The appendix of the book contains descriptions of four of the wines, representing each of the vintages that were tasted in ascending order of age. Shepherd records his observations of color, bouquet, taste, and longueur or finish and includes a summary of his impressions. Berrouet’s remarks, invariably more detailed and precise, are also recorded. Although Shepherd’s “basic judgments … turned out to be in line with Jean-Claude’s” (p. 182), he concludes that he “lacked the linkage between the sensory impression and the appropriate vocabulary” (p. 182). On the train back to Paris, he reflects on the tasting and asks himself, “Could this lead to a book on the brain and how it creates the taste of wine?” (p. 183).

The title of the resulting volume was apparently coined by Shepherd. Building on his earlier book, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters, Neuroenology specifically focuses on wine tasting. This three-part exposi- tion describes “Fluid Dynamics of Wine Tasting,” “How Sensory Systems Create the Taste of Wine,” and “How Central Brain Systems Create the Pleasure of the Taste of Wine.” Shepherd’s main point in the first part is that to understand how wine tasting works, we have to go with the flow: “[A]ll the sensations created by the brain are due to movements of the wine in our mouth and throat and the move- ment of the volatile molecules released into the air in our respiratory tract” (p. 7). Throughout the text, he builds on figures of the human head in cross section to illus- trate how and where wine travels and is perceived. Aiming at nonspecialists, he includes boxes that summarize fundamental facts in nontechnical terms. For example, the first one lists “The Main Steps in the Fluid Dynamics of Wine: Taking a sip, mixing with saliva” (p. 9), and so on. We learn about orthonasal and retronasal olfaction: the former occurs when sniffing the wine through the nose, while the latter, which is more critical for creating the taste of wine, happens once the liquid is in the mouth and swallowed. “[R]etronasal smell is a new frontier in the science and art of wine tasting and therefore should be a central focus of neuro- enology” (p. 128), he asserts. The five chapters of Part I go deeper and broader to explain the physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, and, of course, fluid dynamics of what happens once wine is sipped and eventually swallowed.

Combining wine with saliva begins the process of breaking it down. “Since the amount of saliva varies substantially among individuals, this can be a significant var- iable in wine tasting” (p. 20), Shepherd advises. My immediate reaction is that this factor alone should cast doubt on the usefulness of wine critics, whose state of saliva is never reported. Furthermore, Shepherd declares that “swallowing is one of the most critical functions for wine tasting” (p. 48). It is necessary for the creation of the aroma burst, the “initial strong perception” (p. 53) of the wine taste, and for the finish. This assertion begs the question as to what a wine critic should do when faced with a couple of dozen wines that have to be evaluated over a few hours. If the samples are spit out, are the assessments complete? If they are not, how reliable are the observations as intoxication increases?

In Part II, Shepherd lays out the current understanding of how the senses combine to create the flavor of wine. We see the color of the wine. Olfaction is orthonasal and retronasal, and each contributes differently. We sense the mouthfeel of the wine. Our taste buds react to its constituents. Each sensation creates images in the brain. Referencing a study by researchers at Stockholm University, Shepherd notes that “the ability to form mental images is weaker for smell [than sight], and there is more individual variation. Those with more experience and who possess a richer vocabulary for describing odors are best at olfactory imagery” (p. 95). Through mul- tiple levels, the brain merges these images to create the flavor of the wine.

But as we learn in Part III, many other factors influence our reaction to wine. Effects of age and gender on smell are briefly summarized. Memory and language each merit a short chapter. Shepherd calls pleasure “The Final Judge in Wine Tasting” (p. 162) and explains the status of research into how the brain creates it. The final chapter, “Practical Applications of Neuroenology to the Pleasure of Wine Tasting,” looks at what wine makers do to attract consumers to their products. The literature he cites focuses on alcohol content, price, and expertise. A Spanish team monitoring brain activity while high and low alcohol wines were consumed observed that, contrary to their expectations, the low-alcohol wine was perceived as more intense. “[T]heir results ‘seem to support the intuition of some professional wine experts’ that lower-alcohol content wines ‘have a better chance to induce greater sensitivity to the overall flavor expressed by the wine’” (p. 170). Shepherd cites a widely publicized study that “showed that the high-priced wines were judged to be more pleasant, even though they were the same wines as the lower priced one” (pp. 170–171), as an example of a phenomenon studied in neuroeconomics. (This relatively new field spawned its own professional organization, the Society for NeuroEconomics [www.neuroeconomics.org])

. So our perception and opinion of a wine result from a complicated synthesis of sensory images and extrinsic factors. “[W]hen our brain creates the taste of wine, it combines the integration of sensory inputs with the complex top-down modulation by our central brain systems” (p. 171), Shepherd concludes.

Attempting to educate nonexperts in a topic that is inherently technical and involves multiple disciplines and their terminologies is fraught. By breaking down the subject, and using illustrations and sidebars, Shepherd endeavors to do so in this book. The result is imperfect. Frequent repetition of material serves to break up the flow rather than facilitate it. The reader is continuously sent to figures in earlier chapters or prom- ised deeper discussion in the text ahead, thereby creating a disjoint narrative of complex processes. In one case, a typo (Figure 7.3 on p. 112 should be 7.2) in the midst of a description of taste receptors is disorienting. A descriptive list of figures with page numbers and a glossary of terms would have been helpful. The tone of the exposition vacillates between what would be expected in an academic journal or trade magazine and what you might see in a wine tasting 101 course. Because this book synthesizes the results of research across a number of disciplines, specialists in any of the fields might be interested in seeing how their work contributes to a new discipline and in learning about open questions. An extensive index aids in navigating the text, and the bibliog- raphy lists some of the primary sources that serve as the foundation of the discussion.

On the other hand, the benefits for the wine taster who is not a specialist are scant. Discussions are filled with jargon, and in some cases, the advice can even be naïve. Would a likely reader need two reminders that wine glasses should not be filled to the top? Certainly an understanding of what happens from the time wine is sniffed and sipped until its finish fades can inform us of ways to do our sampling to maximize pleasure. I suspect, though, that for many of us, this level of understanding could be gained from reading a popular article.

Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
nhulkower@yahoo.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2017.34

In Vino Duplicitas: The Rise and Fall of a Wine Forger Extraordinaire

By: Peter Hellman
Reviewer: Richard E. Quandt
Pages: 335-338
Full Text PDF
Book Review

If I were reviewing a conventional mystery novel, I would be careful not to reveal the ending (like “the butler did it”) or particular and exciting turns of the plot. But this book is different: any reader of the press already knows how it ends, although few people remember all the details of the story. It is the story of Rudy Kurniawan, a young Chinese Indonesian who succeeded in fooling a large number of sophisticated wine drinkers. He arrived in the United States around 1993 and soon thereafter had his epiphany: he tasted a bottle of Opus One in a restaurant. He started to buy expen- sive wines (real ones) in quantity, and it is obvious that he had a fine palate, honed by consuming prodigious quantities of great wine; it is said that he could identify ten out of twelve Burgundies in a blind tasting. By 2006, the auction house Acker Merrall & Condit had sold seventeen thousand bottles of “Rudy wine” for some $35 million. Where did Kurniawan acquire his wines? Well, he bought a lot of wine at auctions, he bought some private cellars, and, most importantly, he claimed to have acquired the cellar of a French firm, Nicolas, which had bought wine at the source. Nicolas had the practice of periodically recorking bottles, which explained why many of Kurniawan’s wines had unbranded corks, and the pristine condition of his labels was explained by the claim that American cellars are drier than French cellars— hence, less mold. But the provenance of many of his wines was left unclear, and Kurniawan himself was less than forthcoming in revealing his sources.

The first four chapters set the stage for what is to follow. We find a tremendous amount of information about the actors on this stage: the collectors, the sellers, the auc- tioneers, the experts of one sort or another. The descriptions of the meals and the tast- ings, and particularly the costs of the wines, are astonishing and verge on the obscene. Kurniawan himself bought unbelievable quantities of wine out of a family allowance he claimed to be $1 million per month, and it is no surprise that at parties he would show up carrying as gifts as many as a dozen first-class bottles. No wonder that he rapidly became the darling of the California and New York wine-tasting circles.

Kurniawan was an engaging, charming young man who made friends easily, at least in part because he was extremely generous and provided genuinely great, expen- sive wines at many of the parties he attended. He showered his largesse on his friends at parties typically held at restaurants, where he often picked up the tab and left extremely generous tips. Many of his rich friends were initially incredulous when it began to appear that things were not all they seemed to be. But the accounts in the book of his various rich friends, the parties, and the amounts that were spent are all fascinating, and the author does a great service to all of us who do not move in those rarified circles.

In the April 25, 2007, Acker et al. auction, twenty-one Burgundies by the house of Ponsot made an appearance, many of them true rarities. Douglas Barzelay, a New York lawyer, seems to have been the first to notice the implausibility that Acker would have Clos St. Denis going back to 1945, when, according to the Ponsot website, the first Clos St. Denis was produced in 1982. Barzelay promptly called Ponsot in France. Laurent Ponsot made a hurried personal appearance in New York, and the Ponsot lots were withdrawn from the auction. The details of the story that unfolded immediately and also later are fascinating. Concerned about the provenance of the wines allegedly made by him, Ponsot demanded infor- mation about the provenance from Kurniawan, but the latter failed to provide any useful clues. The internal and external evidence continued to mount: in various sub- sequent auctions, wines with huge amounts of deposit in them turned out to have pristine labels, other dubious wines were found in various contexts, more vintages were discovered predating the first actual production of the wines, and wines that are so rare that nobody gets more than a tiny allocation were sold by Kurniawan by the case (e.g., a case of 1959 Roumier Musigny). A huge lot of wines sold directly by Kurniawan to Michael Fascitelli was examined by a wine expert who declared that 691 out of 812 bottles were fakes. Some of his wines offered for sale were withdrawn from auctions at the initiative of the auction houses, particularly as the tell-tale signs of fraud continued to increase (e.g., when a word on the label was mis- spelled). In the meantime, Kurniawan seemed to go ever deeper into debt. To satisfy his creditors, he had to collateralize some of his wines, but in this endeavor, too, he could not resist straying from the straight path: he collateralized the same batch of wines more than once. Some of his buyers became obsessed with unmasking him. Billionaire Bill Koch belatedly discovered that he had some four hundred fake bottles from Kurniawan and became so passionate about this matter that he sank substantial moneys into gamma-ray detectors to check for the presence of Caesium-137 in the wines, which was not present in the atmosphere before the nuclear explosions in 1945. Koch himself was involved in a number of lawsuits and collected damages. By 2012, Jason Hernandez, an assistant district attorney, and James Wynne, an FBI agent, had teamed up and built a pretty good case against Kurniawan. After many turns, the end of the story is that he was indicted, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to ten years in prison.

The details of this saga are explained and documented extensively. So is the trial itself, including the testimonies of key witnesses, including Laurent Ponsot, Christophe Roumier, and Aubert de Villaine of the fabled Domaine de la Romanée Conti (Kurniawan had consigned for sale so many fake bottles of Romanée Conti that he was colloquially referred to by some of his friends as “Dr. Conti”). The judge declined to throw out the evidence seized from his premises on the grounds of a questionable search by FBI agents, but Kurniawan might have gotten a shorter sentence if he had plea-bargained, which he declined to do.

I am leaving out many fascinating details of the story, but at least four questions remain: (1) How did he do it? (2) Why did he do it? (3) How come it took so long for someone to notice that something was amiss with the wines? (4) Why do we care? In other words, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, isn’t it a duck?

First, the methods he employed varied. Sometimes he would take genuine bottles with significant amounts of ullage and fill them with lesser wines of broadly similar characteristics. Sometimes he would just change the vintage year stamped on a case or on the label. His definitely ran a “home operation,” storing vast amounts of wine par- aphernalia in his house. When FBI agents ultimately entered his house, they discovered

bags containing wine labels, bags of wine cork, wax used to seal corks, rubber stamps used to stamp the year of a wine vintage on a label or brand a cork, empty bottles of wine (including large format bottles), wooden wine crates, bottles submerged in water to aid removing the labels, computer equipment (including prints, and stacks of preprinted wine labels, printed on high quality paper).

In progress counterfeiting operations were also evident in the kitchen, living room, and family room. Bottles were soaking in the kitchen sink to remove their labels prior to being transformed into other wines. … Numerous bottles in wine racks had no capsules. Four bottles of 1985 Henri Jayer Richebourg were lined up on a shelf. … Less than six hours before his arrest, Rudy had offered these Richebourgs to a Swedish dealer. (p. 144)

It was obviously a large operation, and as might be expected in anything this large and complex, Kurniawan made errors that ultimately contributed to his downfall. In addition to attending wine tastings, buying wine, dealing with auction houses, and juggling his increasingly shaky finances, Kurniawan had to have time to carry out the various operations to make his wines look plausibly like the real thing, which raises an additional question: did he have any help? No uncovered evidence suggests that he had cohorts in this enterprise, although ex post experts disagree regarding how much of his time it took to carry out the fakery by himself.

We don’t have a good answer for the second question of “why.” He clearly grossed large amounts of money from his phony sales, but he does not seem to have netted substantial profits from his nefarious activities. In fact, it is quite likely that he lost on balance large portions of his family’s money (the source of which also continues to be a mystery, although several members of his Indonesian family have been con- victed or suspected of fraud). He was clearly a man who loved wine and loved to drink it, he was happy to move in the circles of the elite wine drinkers who collect superexpensive bottles, and his buying and selling activities undoubtedly contributed to cementing his connection to this group—but there had to be less risky and less work-intensive ways of accomplishing the same goals. He might have derived some perverse satisfaction from putting one over on people, but such a nasty streak seems hardly compatible with what has been otherwise described as an charm- ing and engaging personality.

Concerning the third question, the initial clues that he was faking it came not so much from the physical evidence in the wines themselves but from internal inconsis- tencies (e.g., he was peddling a Ponsot wine prior to the date at which that wine was first made by Ponsot). Of course, once suspicions arose, purchasers started to find anomalies (such as misspellings on labels), but buyers did not immediately start to say to themselves, “Oh gee, this does not really taste like Richebourg or like any wine made by the Domaine de la Romanée Conti.” It is difficult to escape the conclusion that wine drinkers’ much vaunted taste buds are not all they are cracked up to be, even in the rarified circles in which Kurniawan moved. Of course, even if somebody had suspicions, it would take some nerve to accuse a well-known owner/dealer/wine expert of chicanery, but the situation is curious nevertheless.

The last question of “why we care” is perhaps the most interesting, for it is the same question that arises in the case of fake art. Imagine an art forger who is so good that his fakery is totally undetectable. Or, better yet, imagine a combination of software and hardware that can reproduce a painting with real, authentic paint on a pixel level. (That technique presumably could be used to reproduce an existing painting by a painter but not to produce a new painting “in the style of” a particular painter.) Certainly the average art lover would not be able to distinguish the fake painting from the real one, and possibly not even experts could do so. But what the fake painting would miss is authenticity. Whether we buy art or wine, we are paying, among other things, for authenticity. You get bragging rights if you have cases of Voguë’s Musigny or a Romanée Conti in your cellar, but you get no bragging rights from having fake bottles of those wines. And although the real thing is clearly delicious, the bragging- rights aspect of ownership may be at least as important if you are a serious collector.

This is a wonderful book, well written and carefully researched, and it paints an illuminating picture of a segment of wine drinkers among whom most of us do not belong. Peter Hellman has done a superb job, and the fact that we know from the beginning “who done it” does not diminish one bit the enjoyment one gets from the tale. The only thing I would have done differently is to include an index, but that is my hobby-horse: I think that all nonfiction books should have one.

Richard E. Quandt
Princeton University
requandt@gmail.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2017.35

The Secrets of My Life: Vintner, Prisoner, Soldier, Spy

By: Peter M. F. Sichel
Reviewer: Morton Hochstein
Pages: 338-340
Full Text PDF
Book Review

In the eighties and nineties, when there were no bike lanes, Peter Sichel could be seen, alone in full business attire, pedaling from an Upper West Side apartment to his offices in midtown Manhattan. Before he braved the city’s hazardous traffic, Sichel wore an army uniform in World War II, serving later as an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and CIA agent in Europe and the Far East. In civilian life, he reorganized the family’s wine business in Mainz, Germany, which had been overrun by the Nazis. He became a successful American wine merchant and Bordeaux entrepreneur and attained certain renown as the man who gave the world Blue Nun.

The Sichel saga began in 1935. With danger looming, his parents interrupted his German schooling and sent him to continue his education at St. Cyprian’s and Stowe School in England. While he was away, the family escaped from Nazi Germany in 1935 on a ruse and settled in France. Sichel was working in the firm’s Bordeaux office when he was interned as a Jew by the Nazis, but he escaped to the United States and joined the American Army one week after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

He led troops into Mainz, where he took possession of the family winery, not revealing his identity until he could be assured that the contents of those cellars were safe from sabotage.

He later was the leader of an OSS unit in Heidelberg, charged with ferreting out key Nazis who had gone underground and recruiting scientists specializing in advanced weaponry. He later became the head of the CIA office in Berlin, where he fought against Russian agents recruiting those same specialists.

Other assignments as a “spook” took him to Washington and then Hong Kong. This book underwent severe vetting for security by CIA officials, but they did allow Sichel the freedom to discuss his three years in Hong Kong. He recalls living a glorious life in which “[l]iquor flowed freely, the more we enjoyed a generous living allowance to be able to afford our life with great joy.”

After seventeen years in the army, military intelligence, and the CIA, he returned to civilian life, saying, “I left because the CIA did things I didn’t like, such as sending people into the Ukraine to work in fabricated resistance groups. They were poten- tially being sent to their deaths.”

It would be interesting to know what was not revealed in this book. I would like to have learned more details about Sichel’s experiences as an agent of the OSS and the CIA. He had great difficulty gaining permission to publish his story. Sichel explains, “It took more than a year to get clearance and some hard bargaining. The bone of contention were: cover used by me, methodology of operations, and finally details on Political Action, where the CIA was either not willing to admit having mounted the operation, or did not want me to mention the big sums spent on what should have been perceived as useless operations, playing into the hands of internal security ser- vices in such places as China, the Ukraine and Albania” (email from Peter M.F. Sichel from Oct 10, 2017).

He returned to civilian life to take control of the family wine-importing business in New York, which he later dissolved in favor of linkage with Schieffelin, then a major wine and spirits company. In those midcentury years, wine had just begun its ascent to popularity, and fortified wine was soon to be eclipsed. He advertised an obscure German wine, Blue Nun, as the wine you can drink “right through the meal,” and it skyrocketed to record sales. In what may have been his only marketing disappoint- ment, he tried to do the same with a Chinese-styled brand, but that effort never took off.

In 1984, he became the chairman of the German parent company, selling it to another German company, Langguth. He also arranged a partial sale of Schieffelin to LVMH, the giant luxury-goods conglomerate. Until 2006, he owned the Bordeaux Chateau Fourcas-Listrac, which he then sold to Hermes.

In dealing with German winemakers, Sichel recalls that he tried not to dwell on the past. “I experienced the same embarrassing problems that I had experienced in Berlin after the war. People were anxious to tell me how well they had behaved during the Nazi period. I adopted the same policy I’d had in Berlin. The minute the subject came up, I made it plain that I did not want to hear about their behavior during the Nazi period. I pointed out that it involved their conscience, and if they had really behaved poorly, they, hopefully, would have ended up in jail by now. This usually ended that conversation.”

Sichel has appeared often on American television as a wine authority and in Germany as a witness to the immediate postwar years in Berlin, where he directed the CIA office. He has been a member of several New York wine societies and a fre- quent judge in wine competitions.

Blue Nun can still be found on store shelves and referenced in the Beastie Boys album Check Your Head, which includes a musical interlude in which a narrator tells of a party held in Peter Sichel’s New York dwelling, where guests praise the wines. The record includes excerpts from Sichel’s audio recording “On Wine: How to Select and Serve.”

His memoir contains a chapter titled “Some Advice on Wine” that could easily become the basis for an authoritative book. I would suggest one addition to the long title of this book: add the phrase bon vivant. In military and civilian form, Sichel has created an enviable lifestyle for himself, although I have not seen him lately on his bicycle.

Morton Hochstein
New York City, NY
mortonherbert@yahoo.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2017.36

I Taste Red: The Science of Tasting Wine

By: Jamie Goode
Reviewer: Denton Marks
Pages: 340-344
Full Text PDF
Book Review

By stating that color has taste, Dr. Jamie Goode’s title alludes to the wine consum- er’s challenges that he explores. He alerts readers to coming surprises through his discussion of our evolving understanding of wine tasting that goes far beyond the mouth. Goode introduces and explains the “multimodal” nature of wine flavor, leading to larger issues, such as “the nature of conscious experience” (p. 89).

You may know of UK-based Jamie Goode from his past books (e.g., Goode, 2014) or his blog (wineanorak.com, self-described as “one of the most interesting and com- prehensive wine resources on the web”).

Goode is well-intentioned. Trained as a plant biologist, he discusses not only biology and chemistry but also “neuroscience” (e.g., psychology, philosophy) in addressing what it means to experience wine and raising such issues as the relevance of expert ratings to informing that experience.

After discussing his background and goals for the coming nine chapters, he spends Chapters 2–4 (about 40 percent of the text) summarizing the relevant science (Ch. 2: smell and taste chemistry; Ch. 3: brain processes; Ch. 4: wine flavor chemistry). Knowledgeable readers may find novel connections to wine chemistry and tasting. However, those without a strong wine background will take much of this on faith, accepting that it presents our best understanding of the body’s processing of wine taste (he omits other science, such as health effects). Goode and his editor(s) have tried for a balanced presentation of i) scientific content establishing bona fides with technical readers, ii) challenging questions to provoke wine aficionados from diverse technical backgrounds, and iii) coverage of a considerable relevant literature involving various disciplines (but not much economics). Specialists in any of the fields considered might find the coverage partial, but those who acknowledge the complexity of understanding wine will appreciate the challenge he undertakes and agree that he is not unsuccessful.

For wine economists, Goode’s most thought-provoking discussions might be i) assessments of wine expertise, ii) cultural differences in appreciation, and iii) the brain as model builder.

Among others, wine economists have studied the value of experts (e.g., Ashton, 2017). Central to that is the interpersonal comparison between expert and con- sumer evaluations. Goode prepares us by noting in Chapter 5 (“Individual Differences in Flavor Perception”) significant individual differences in wine tasting, meaning that “the same wine is not the same to all people” (p. 127): we might agree in sorting wines into a handful of quality categories, but finer distinc- tions invite disagreement. In the next chapter (Ch. 6, “Why We Like the Wines We Do”), the validity of wine-tasting expertise is central. Goode acknowledges the evidence of experts’ unreliability (e.g., citing Hodgson) but concludes that “wine expertise is not illusory” (p. 143). His meaning of expertise is not clear— whether simply technical (e.g., grape, region) or aesthetic (quality differentiation). A subsequent discussion of wine aesthetics provides some clarification: “A rating cannot be a global … score that is a property of that wine. … [C]hoose [an expert] whose own narrative … is largely overlapping with yours; you need to adjust for differences and calibrate yourself to the critic” (p. 149). Given that few of us become that familiar with an expert and her wines, any implied endorsement seems highly qualified.

The relatively concise Chapter 9 (“Is Wine Tasting Subjective or Objective?”) pro- vides his most extensive discussion of expertise. It opens with an enduring contradic- tion from many experts’ advice: drink what you like—don’t be intimidated by others’ opinions—but the expert can guide you to the best. Goode presents the argu- ment that tasting is subjective by quoting neurobiologist Gordon Shepherd (e.g., 2017). Our perceptions—including odors, tastes, and flavors—are finally products of our brains, not characteristics of the stimulant (e.g., wine). Because our brains and their contents are individually unique, the translation of stimuli into perceptions is also unique—not necessarily very different from one to another, but essentially unique. He then counters that premise with extensive quotes from philosopher Barry Smith, who insists that we need an intermediate step in going from objective description (chemistry) to subjective evaluation: the determination of “objective flavor,” which, he admits, our brains can perceive differently, given the myriad influences upon wine tasting.

Goode wants to believe in objective flavor—”to avoid the dead end of subjectivity” (p. 191). As an expert who confesses that “[s]ome days I seem to taste with more clarity. … [T]he wine shows more of itself,” he asserts that “we have [an intersubjec- tive body of] wine knowledge in common within a shared aesthetic system … [that] is not subject to the problem of subjectivity that bedevils actual perception of flavor” (pp. 191–192). Experts simply have considerably more knowledge. He proposes the UC-Davis Wine Aroma Wheel as “the big leap forward,” the use of which gives tasting notes “the appearance of objectivity … [and] a much more scientific and precise-sounding language” (p. 192)—so not quite objective and precise.

He ultimately endorses the 100-point scale: “A score out of 100 promises to be much more precise—and objective—than a five-star rating system, for example” (p. 192). Given the evidence of individual differences, lack of true objectivity, and doubt about the value of fine distinctions and ratings presented earlier, this surprise is not one Goode intended.

Then he demurs. In closing, Goode acknowledges his lingering unease, citing cog- nitive scientist Wendy Parr’s conclusion that taste and smell perceptions are much more diverse than vision, hearing, and trigeminal (facial sensation nerve) percep- tions: “[assuming] a large degree of shared objectivity … brings enormous benefits. But whether we will ever be able to compensate for our individual, subjec- tive differences sufficiently to share our perceptions of wine in a way that is abso- lutely, 100 percent meaningful is unknown” (p. 193).

Goode’s discussion of cultural differences complements the discussion of experts. He notes (Ch. 5) that cultural differences in flavor perception likely arise because they reflect different “aroma and flavor objects encoded in … brains” (p. 117)— having discussed encoding’s key role in Chapter 3. However, Chapter 8 (“The Language of Wine”) is the strongest on cultural differences. Intrapersonal communi- cation is our ability to translate our perceptions of a wine into words or other symbols that at least we understand and perhaps remember; interpersonal communication is more self-explanatory. Regarding the interpersonal, Goode dis- cusses i) the challenge of describing wine and whether language shapes perception or vice versa and ii) how language can structure and constrain communication, perhaps suppressing the poetry of great wine. Regarding the intrapersonal, as we move from stimulus to response, he asks how we record sensory responses, perhaps in words (he does not consider numbers, despite his endorsement of 100- point scoring).

Not surprisingly, cultural (and corresponding language) differences are relevant, complicating cross-cultural communication. A French tendency toward musical metaphors (p. 179) might clash with an English or German tendency toward taxo- nomic descriptions. Groups with a more expansive vocabulary for perceiving odors (e.g., certain Asian tribes [p. 181]) might identify nuances that American tasters overlook. More simply, how do we communicate or even recognize a wine flavor, such as eucalyptus, in an Australian cabernet sauvignon if we have never expe- rienced eucalyptus? Chapter 7 (“Constructing Reality”) argues that our approach to experience at whose core is choice making is essentially modeling (one section title: “The Brain’s Need for a Model”). Through experience, our brains select the key var- iables needed for reliable predictions and process data from those variables to predict what we experience at every instant, using a Bayesian updating process as new infor- mation becomes available (and adjusting the set of key variables).

He acknowledges related questions of free will; the “modeling” view suggests that the concept is complicated. We can freely develop and nurture our own model of the world (how consciously?), but the model governs our choices. The question becomes the stage of brain work at which we lose control. For those wondering about the inclusion of philosophy as part of neuroscience, Goode’s discussion of free will illus- trates the connection, one of many in the mind-brain literature (e.g., Bickle, 2013).

Aside from its thought-provoking and wide-ranging discussion, here are some concerns. Goode states his concern that “the reader might find this book stodgy and hard to read, worthy but dull,” because he uses academic studies extensively (p. 6). To avoid this issue, he “kept a brighter tone and introduced a narrative thread … and decided not to reference the research studies and scientific papers [that] make books seem overly scientific, … likely to put people off” (p. 6). He pro- vides a bibliography, organized by chapter, but I could not always tell how closely it supports the text, and I could not always connect entries with content.

I acknowledge his choice without agreeing with it and allow that perhaps this style increases the book’s popular appeal, but it (and some typographical errors and a style that sometimes meanders) complicated my reading at times and raised ques- tions that more thorough and careful documentation and editing might have avoided.

Given Goode’s interdisciplinary coverage and the infancy of the relevant wine research, it is not surprising that he provides more good questions than answers.

Given his target audience, one can also sympathize with his breezy style, which sometimes skates over what we actually know. Despite my reservations, this is a good read that compels a serious student to think hard about the scientific basis for her wine enjoyment.

Denton Marks
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
marksd@uww.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2017.37

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