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JWE Volume 17 | 2022 | No. 1

Journal of Wine Economics Volume 17 | 2022 | No. 1

Estimating Supply Functions for Wine Attributes: A Two-Stage Hedonic Approach

Edward Oczkowski
Pages: 1-26
Abstract

A vast body of literature exists on estimating hedonic price functions, which relate the price of wine to its attributes. Some existing literature has employed producer-specific variables such as quantity sold and producer reputation in hedonic functions to potentially capture supply influences on prices. This practice is inconsistent with the original Rosen (1974) hedonic theoretic foundation. To overcome this deficiency, we extend the literature by using the Rosen two-stage approach, employing data from multi-markets for similar wines to estimate inverse supply functions. The application to Australian produced wines sold in different coun- tries demonstrates the importance of a wine’s quality and age as attributes in inverse supply functions. Results imply the additional costs of producing better quality and older wines are increased as both quality and age are increased. Estimates also suggest that lower marginal costs for attributes are associated with a smaller producer size and older more established producers.

Keywords: attribute supply, Australian wines, wine prices.

Using Neural Network Models for Wine Review Classification

Duwani Katumullage, Chenyu Yang, Jackson Barth and Jing Cao
Pages: 27-41
Full Text PDF
Abstract

Wines are usually evaluated by wine experts and enthusiasts who give numeric ratings as well as text reviews. While most wine classification studies have been based on conventional stat- istical models using numeric variables, there has been very limited work on implementing neural network models using wine reviews. In this paper, we apply neural network models (CNN, BiLSTM, and BERT) to extract useful information from wine reviews and classify wines according to different rating classes. Using a large collection of wine reviews from Wine Spectator, the study shows that BERT, a neural network framework recently developed by Google, has the best performance. In the two-class classification (90–100 and 80–89), BERT achieves an accuracy of 89.12%, followed by BiLSTM (88.69%) and CNN (88.02%). In the four-class classification (95–100, 90–94, 85–89, and 80–84), BERT yields an 81.57% accuracy, while the other two produce an 80% accuracy. The neural network models in the paper are independent of domain knowledge and thus can be easily extended to other kinds of text analysis. Expanding the limited work on wine text review classification studies, these models are up-to-date and provide valuable additions to wine data analysis.

Keywords: BERT, BiLSTM, CNN, natural language processing, neural networks, wine reviews.

A “Sideways” Supply Response in California Winegrapes

Sarah Consoli, Elizabeth A. Fraysse, Natalya Slipchenko, Yi Wang, Jahon Amirebrahimi, Zhiran Qin, Neil Yazma and Travis J. Lybbert
Pages: 42-63
Abstract

This paper explores growers’ supply response to the 2005 “Sideways effect” demand shock (Cuellar, Karnowsky, and Acosta, 2009) triggered by the 2004 release of the movie Sideways. We use a modified difference-in-difference approach to evaluate the supply response in California and regional supply response differences within California. We use U.S. Department of Agriculture data for the period 1999–2012 and find evidence of a supply response in the post-release period that is consistent with the “Sideways effect” on wine demand. The positive supply response for Pinot Noir is stronger than the negative response for Merlot and concentrated in lower value Central Valley vineyards.

Keywords: California, grapes, Merlot, Pinot Noir, supply response, wine.

Wine Review Descriptors as Quality Predictors: Evidence from Language Processing Techniques

Chenyu Yang, Jackson Barth, Duwani Katumullage and Jing Cao
Pages: 64-80
Full Text PDF
Abstract

There is an ongoing debate on whether wine reviews provide meaningful information on wine properties and quality. However, few studies have been conducted aiming directly at comparing the utility of wine reviews and numeric measurements in wine data analysis. Based on data from close to 300,000 wines reviewed by Wine Spectator, we use logistic regression models to investigate whether wine reviews are useful in predicting a wine’s quality classification. We group our sample into one of two binary quality brackets, wines with a critical rating of 90 or above and the other group with ratings of 89 or below. This binary outcome constitutes our dependent variable. The explanatory vari- ables include different combinations of numerical covariates such as the price and age of wines and numerical representations of text reviews. By comparing the explanatory accuracy of the models, our results suggest that wine review descriptors are more accurate in predicting binary wine quality classifications than are various numerical covariates— including the wine’s price. In the study, we include three different feature extraction methods in text analysis: latent Dirichlet allocation, term frequency-inverse document frequency, and Doc2Vec text embedding. We find that Doc2Vec is the best performing feature extraction method that produces the highest classification accuracy due to its capability of using contextual information from text documents.

Keywords: classification, logistic regression, text analysis, wine review.

Book & Film Reviews

Wine Folly: The Master Guide

By: Madeline Puckette and Justin Hammack
Reviewer: Joseph P. Newhouse
Pages: 81-83
Full Text PDF
Book Review

This lavishly produced book, which won the 2019 James Beard Award in the bever- age category, assumes no prior knowledge about wine and thus is aimed at persons who do not regard themselves as wine experts. Its language is clear and readable, and its graphics are numerous, impressive, and informative. Even those who, like the readers of this journal, regard themselves as having a good deal of expertise will likely find things they did not know.

The book is organized into four main sections plus a short glossary and a list of references. The first section entitled “Wine Basics” covers how wine is made, as well as how to taste it, serve it, and store it. A short second section covers pairing with food, although the third section, which describes 86 grapes and 14 wines, also has a considerable amount of information on pairing. The final substantive section covers the geography of wine in 14 major producing countries.

The first section covers five traits of wine, beginning with body. It ranks 47 red wine grapes, from Brachetto as the lightest to Zinfandel as the richest. Similarly, it ranks body among 39 white wine grapes from Melon to Chardonnay, five sparkling wines, and nine dessert wines. It also notes the interactions of the other four traits with body.

The second trait is sweetness, where the authors distinguish five levels of sweetness for still wines and seven for sparkling wines, noting that although sweetness is mea- sured as grams of residual sugar per liter, that measure is not well correlated with one’s perception of sweetness because of the interaction of the other traits with how sweet a wine tastes.

The third trait is tannin, or the polyphenols, found in the grape skins and seeds and in wooden barrels. The authors point out that the health benefits of wine come from tannin, but that wines higher in tannin will taste more bitter; they also rank 44 grapes in their tannin level.

Fourth, they consider acidity, ranking types of wine on a pH scale, with whites generally having higher acidity (lower pH) than reds. Higher acidity wines are lighter bodied and taste less sweet.

The final trait is alcohol or the ethanol level, which is typically 12–15% but can range from 5 to 22%.

Included in the first section’s advice on how to taste wine is a detailed chart on aromas, which lists nine primary aromas, such as black fruit, red fruit, dried fruit, etc., with each of the nine primary aromas subdivided into more specific aromas. For example, the “black fruit” category lists within it seven fruit aromas such as black cherry, blueberry, and boysenberry. In addition to the nine primary aromas, the chart lists 14 secondary and 13 tertiary aromas. Readers are encouraged to write which of these aromas they detect when tasting wine. The first section also includes brief notes about serving and storing wine as well as how wine is made.

In addition to its information on pairings of food and wine, the second section contains brief notes on cooking with wine.

The long third section contains descriptions of 100 common wines, grapes, and blends, including tasting notes and food pairing suggestions. It uses the five traits described in the first section, ranking each of the 100 wines or grapes on a one-to-five scale for each trait. It also gives information on aromas of each of the 100 wines and grapes; my favorite was cat pee for sauvignon blanc. It offers advice on the type of glass to use to serve the wine, the temperature at which to serve it, and whether it should be decanted. There is a circular bar chart for each wine showing where it is grown and the worldwide acreage devoted to it, as well as similar varietals that one might wish to try. In several places, the book help- fully includes suggested pronunciations.

The final section—on the major wine-producing countries—has a map for each of 14 countries, showing its various grape-growing regions and the type of grape grown in each region. For each country, it has notes on several of its wines. The notes are more extensive for some of the countries than for others. They are espe- cially extensive for France, giving as much space to each of its wine regions as several of the other countries; there are also extensive notes for Italy, Spain, and the United States.

My only criticism of the book, which is picky, is its title. If one just came across the book while browsing and looked at its title, one might think the book was an effort to dissuade people from drinking wine. The subtitle—“A Master Guide”—belies that interpretation but could easily go unnoticed since it is in a much smaller font. The authors operate an online website and store with the same name, so perhaps naming the book after the website is an effort to publicize the store. Not surprisingly, one can buy the book at the store.

Readers of this journal may want this book for themselves, particularly for its material on less well-known wines and grapes, or as a gift for a friend or colleague who is less knowledgeable about wine but interested in learning more.

Gerard Basset: Tasting Victory: The Life and Wines of the World’s Favourite Sommelier

By: Gerard Basset
Reviewer: Nick Vink
Pages: 83-86
Full Text PDF
Book Review

The publisher of this book is the first crowdfunded publisher in existence.1 How this works is that they place books they believe are worthy on their website and invite people to pledge funding in return for small rewards—free and/or signed copies of the book, your name printed in the book as a supporter, etc. At the time of writing this review, the publisher was celebrating 10 years of existence, with 476 pub- lished books and about half that number of active projects.

According to the publication Drinks International, crowdfunding for Gerard Basset’s memoirs was spearheaded by Jancis Robinson, and the target was to raise some £14,000.2 The exercise was obviously successful because it raised more than twice this amount before the book was published in early 2020. It is now out of print, so prospective readers must access the ebook version,3 which, it turns out, is well worth reading, even for those of us who prefer to hold a real book in our hands. Why do people write autobiographies or memoirs? Arthur Koestler (2019, pp. 37–39) asked himself this question in the first volume of his own autobiography:

“I believe that people write autobiographies for two main reasons. The first may be called the ‘Chronicler’s urge.’ The second may be called the ‘Ecce Homo motive.’ Both impulses spring from the same source…: the desire to share one’s experiences with others… The Chronicler’s urge expresses the need for the sharing of experience related to external events. The Ecce Homo motive expresses the same need with regard to internal events…

Thus the business of writing autobiography is full of pitfalls. On the one hand, we have the starchy chronicle of the stuffed shirt; on the other, the embarrassing nakedness of the exhi- bitionist …Apart from these two extremes there are various other snares which even compe- tent craftsmen are rarely able to avoid. The most common of these is what one might call the ‘Nostalgic Fallacy.’…

Next among the snares is the ‘Dull Dog Fallacy’… [which] requires that the first person sin- gular… should always appear as a shy, restrained, reserved, colourless individual…”

Of course, none of these faults need much explanation to anyone who has read even the best of autobiographies! So how do the memoirs of Gerard Basset (1957–2019), the world’s favourite sommelier, stack up against these criteria?

I first turn to some facts about his life.

Gerard’s mother was a good cook, and in his early career, it seemed more probable that he would end up being a food expert than a wine expert—especially because his parents knew little about wine and he grew up without ever drinking any—quite an achievement for someone who grew up in la France profonde! Gerard left school at the age of 16 but ended up as a Master of Wine and a Master Sommelier, with an MBA and an MSc degree, and was a recipient of the OBE—more letters behind his name than most, as Jancis Robinson pointed out in her tribute.4 In the process of getting there, he held down a very wide range of jobs, all of them part of a search for whom he wanted to become. These included a shop assistant, factory worker, candy maker, delivery assistant and waiter in a restaurant. Some of these were short-lived, others lasted for a few years, but all seem to have contributed to his future success in one way or another.

For example, his early passions were cycling, watching, and playing football, and it was the latter that took him to the United Kingdom (Glasgow) for the first time. His second soccer trip was to Liverpool. His view of the English before the Liverpool trip:

“Liverpool itself didn’t excite me much and nor did the English – my impression was that they were all strange. They drove on the wrong side of the road, had a boring cuisine, loved tea instead of coffee, drank beer at room temperature and had policemen known as ‘Bobby’ who wore funny hats. And they still had royalty, whereas in France we had been a republic for a long time. To top off the list of peculiarities, it always rained in England, or so I believed.

I wasn’t totally anti-English, as I liked watching The Avengers and The Prisoner, and some of their pop music artists were OK, but overall, I thought they were eccentric.” (p. 14)

Back in France and without much direction in life, he realized that he liked Britain, so saved up to buy a one-way ticket to the United Kingdom (in August 1979, i.e., at the very start of the Thatcher era). Down on his luck in London, he realized that the reason he liked the English was that he had had such good experiences in Liverpool. As a result, he headed north to a summer job as a kitchen porter in an Isle of Man hotel. In his words, “Being a kitchen porter meant getting intimate with the dish- washer.” His culinary experience was summed up as follows:

“The food was extremely basic. The dinner menu had a choice of three starters, one of which was orange juice, which I found surprising. The main course was even simpler, because there was only one, which changed every day for a week and then came around again. The desserts were also very restricted.

The break in routine came on Thursday nights – curry nights. On my first Thursday, the head chef served the curry on rice that he’d coloured bright red. The next Thursday, he’d chosen bright yellow. After I told him that my football team, Saint-Etienne, played in green, he made green rice the following week, in my honour.” (p. 21)

Before this UK trip, he took a three-day excursion to New York. He has this to say about New York’s cuisine:

“But what I particularly remember was the New York-style breakfast: bacon and eggs in a style called ‘over easy’, meaning cooked lightly on both sides, with grits, made from corn maize. And lashings of coffee.” (p. 19)

He had saved up more than enough for four months in England, so apart from the short trip to New York, he also did a week-long excursion to Leningrad and Moscow (this was the late 1970s). He had nothing to say about Russian cuisine!

After eight months in the United Kingdom, he returned to France and treated himself to a meal at Paul Bocuse’s restaurant outside Lyon to experience what a customer experienced in a Michelin three-star restaurant. This was followed by a state-sponsored cooking course, a job at a one-star Michelin restaurant, an unsuccessful excursion to Paris, and then back to the same hotel in the south of England (the Crown Hotel in Lyndhurst, in the New Forest area of the south of England). The hotel had changed owners during that time, and the new owners appointed a restaurant manager, who in turn wanted a sommelier—and that is how he ended up in the profession that was to become his passion of the rest of his career. This also marks the first substantive mention of wine in his memoirs —almost 50 pages into the book.

The New Forest area is also where he met his wife, Nina, and where he spent most

of the rest of his life when not traveling, something he did extensively.

After the Crown Hotel, Gerard moved to Chewton Glen Hotel in nearby Hampshire, and this became the launching pad for the two marks of his success: his fame and fortune. The former came from his willingness to subject himself to the rigors of a whole host of wine tasting and sommelier competitions, and the latter from the joint venture that he and the Chewton Glen restaurant manager, Robin Hutson, launched: in 1994, the two of them started a chain of luxury boutique hotels with other shareholders, with the first Hotel Du Vin opening in Winchester, culminating in a chain of seven hotels, which they sold a decade later. In the process, he turned an initial investment of £25,000 into £2.5 million!

There are three aspects to his subsequent career: another hotel venture, more compe- titions and prizes, and extensive travel all over the world on different aspects of the wine business. A year after the sale of the hotel group, he and his wife opened the TerraVina Hotel in Lyndhurst, a venture that lasted 10 years and started and ended less success- fully than expected. It would be fair to summarize the darker side of this venture as con- sisting of problems with staff, builders, bankers, accountants, lawyers, and Brexit, roughly in that order. No real surprise there! After a decade of this, he and his wife rein- vented and renamed the hotel, turning it into a boutique B&B called Spot in the Woods. At the same time, he was busy collecting initials to add to his name, a process that cul- minated in the title “Best Sommelier in the World” in 2010 after being runner up on three occasions, as well as in his MW, MS, MBA, and MSc qualifications.

Unfortunately, this is where the one weakness of this book is most visible: too much detailed description of one business venture after another and of one compe- tition after another and too little about his work in the world of wine writ large. One wonders if these rather pedestrian passages would not have benefited from the firm hand of a competent editor.

Yet this is a minor quibble. The book ends as it began, putting the author’s wonderful optimism, obvious penchant for hard work, and deep appreciation of friends and family at the forefront of a story that is well worth telling.

Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: Revised & Updated

By: Kevin Zraly
Reviewer: Roman L. Weil
Pages: 87-89
Full Text PDF
Book Review

My first draft of this review elicited a colleague’s comment that I should not go to the corner occupied by the Grumpy Economist, which is already covered, so I will take on the mantle of the Honest Oenonomist. While this book is neither “complete” nor solely a “course,” it has merit as a reference book and a coffee table showpiece.

Here, the book does well. It has a first-rate index, contains an entertaining 43-page personal history of the author’s involvement with wine, includes a first-course lesson/ chapter, which provides 28 well-done pages about grapes, weather, fermentation, wine chemistry, aging, bottles,1 glasses, and wine labels. Three of those pages show striking photographs. This recurring theme—pages devoted to photographs, not to teaching nor to reference material—contributes to coffee table status. In my opinion, the best teaching material in the book is the 19.5 pages devoted to the phys- iology and biology of taste and smell.

After its introduction, the book provides more course lessons: Prelude, America, France, Spain, Italy, Australia/New Zealand, South America, Germany, Sparkling, Fortified, Other Countries, and Quiz questions on the preceding chapters.

In the classroom, many of us “teach to the test.” So, a sample of Mr. Zraly’s quiz questions gives a flavor of what the course teaches. Name the ten top states in wine consumption per capita [in the U.S.]. Name one chateau from each of the five growths [of Bordeaux]. What are the three most important white wine villages in the Cote de Beaune? Name the four different quality levels of Chianti. What were the first grapes planted in Argentina? What are the three major types of Champagne?

Why do I find that the book functions best as a reference/coffee table book rather than a text to accompany a course? As one example, the 24 pages of the chapter on French red wines and Bordeaux includes 6 pages of attractive photographs. Another two pages list the names of the 1855 classified growths. All in all, I found that 40% of the material in the chapter is reference material. Where does this leave me? With 55% of the overall book allocated to pictures and reference, only 45% provides course teaching. Even as a reference book, it sometimes behaves strangely. Suppose you want to know what foods go well with chardonnay. The index directs you to pages: 96, 245, 334, and 347. Page 96 recommends oysters, crab, trout, and salmon, while the last of these favors sirloin steak.

Let’s look at another chapter. The one on Sparkling wines caught my eye. This chapter does a good job teaching about the locales in Champagne, the Méthode Champenoise, and different styles of Champagne while providing a taxonomy of twenty-five well-known houses classified from light-delicate to full and rich.

How many Champagne labels can you name? I cannot get to 10. Did you know there are thousands? I first read about Champagne in Michael Broadbent’s (1980) Great Vintage Wine Book in the 1980s and decided that if Winston Churchill liked Pol Roger, that was good enough for me. I could not tell the taste difference, but I bought it and liked it. It was only years later that I learned from Gary Westby of K&L Wine Merchants that no-name labels could taste as good as famous ones. The book says that there are “more than 260 Champagne houses,” and the pie chart on the same page implies that those houses comprise 80% of the total number, so there must be about 325. Where are the thousands of other labels? I assume that Champagne labels and growers differ, but the course does not offer an explanation.

Horizontal and vertical comparisons of wines are familiar to readers of this Journal. The book recommends at least three such comparisons of two or more wines in each chapter, but not one suggests a “triangle test,” which has become standard in the testing/tasting world (Weil, 2007). Mr. Zraly may not prefer such tests, but should not a complete course alert readers to their existence and merits (or demerits)?

Readers of this Journal will be interested to know that the course omits oenometric research findings from its teachings. There is a discussion of the effects of weather on wine, but there is no mention of the now-classic work of Ashenfelter and others using auction prices to identify the relationship between weather and wine quality (Ashenfelter, 2010). Elsewhere, the course discusses wine words and descriptors but does not question whether anyone can reliably describe, then replicate, wine tastes and smells (Lehrer, 2009). The book also describes and illustrates the steepness of the growing hills in Germany, but unfortunately does not mention the analysis, which has estimated the degree days hitting the grapes on those hillsides as a function of the steepness and orientation of the hillsides, and then has related the degree days to the higher prices the wines fetch, and hence the higher quality of the wine (Ashenfelter and Storchmann, 2010). I do not know whether Mr. Zraly is unaware of oenometric research or whether he finds it irrelevant. I will not speculate, as I am trying not to be grumpy.

Based upon many discussions over the years with oenophiles and with those who have relatively little interest in wine, here are just a few questions I believe ought to be addressed in a course about wine (but are not in this book). How do I deal with wine in a restaurant? What should I do when the waiter hands me the cork?2 What do I do if I do not like the wine? Should I buy and lay down wine? Or buy later at auction?

What should I know about cost-effective home wine storage?

An advantage of this book’s being revised annually is that you can buy recent edi- tions on the used book market (e.g., at www.abebooks.com) for about half the cost of the latest edition. You will still get most of the good stuff the 35th edition offers. On the other hand, if you want a solid, inexpensive reference book, I recommend early editions of Jancis Robinson’s (2006) Oxford Companion to Wine.

1 I did not go looking for errors, but I spotted some anyway. Mr. Zraly tells us (pp. 24–25) that a Jeroboam contains four regular-sized (.750 liter) bottles of wine. It fails to note that, while that is true for Burgundy, often in Bordeaux, it holds six. Michael Broadbent, cited as a contributor to Decanter magazine (p. 349), died six months before the publication date of the book, which is noted on page 344.

2 In the past, because unscrupulous restauranteurs were putting fake labels on cheap wines, reputable wine- makers began to brand their corks to cut down on such counterfeiting. Hence, the server would open the bottle in front of the customer and hand over the cork for inspection. Where the mythology around sniffing

The Truffle Hunters

By: Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw
Reviewer: Kenneth Shepsle
Pages: 89-91
Full Text PDF
Film Review

Nominally, The Truffle Hunters is a film about the search for an elusive, bulbous fungus for which foodie connoisseurs are prepared to pay astronomical prices. The highly prized white truffle, or Alba truffle, is found in the forests of Piedmont. (The black, or Périgord, truffle is found, and increasingly cultivated, in southwestern France and is less highly prized, but not exactly chopped liver.)1 The truffle, itself, might qualify as a best-supporting actor nominee, but the real stars of this beautiful film are the wiry old men (some well into their 80s) and their faithful dogs who trudge through dark forests at night in search of these heavenly delights. In fact, this film is really a love story between the men and their dogs.

The narrative focuses on four men, ranging in age from 60s to mid-80s, their well- trained dogs, and their closely guarded territories in the forest outside their Piedmont village.

The men. They are old but enviably vigorous. (This reviewer is old but not so vig- orous!) They care for their dogs, treating them as family members. One of the men, seriously contemplating his mortality at age 87, worries about who will care for his dog once he is gone. He has nightly conversations with his dog on the subject.

The dogs. Amazing! Historically, pigs were used for hunting truffles. The problem was that they ate most of the product. So, truffle hunters turned to specially trained dogs who were more easily encouraged to locate, but not eat, the truffles.

The territory. The forests of Piedmont are commonly held; there are no enclosures or property rights to tracts of forest land. Given the high value of harvested wild truffles,2 and the inability of truffle hunters to claim territorial property rights, truffle hunting is a very secretive affair. The old men and their dogs head for their favorite hunting grounds at night, alone and unwilling to reveal their locations. This has a labor market implication as well. The men are so secretive that they are loath to take on younger apprentices. While it is unclear how the old men orig- inally learned their vocation, their unwillingness to pass along their skills to younger men threatens to force younger men to reinvent the wheel.

The film itself is cinematographically absorbing—picturesque Piedmont land- scapes lusciously portrayed; interior shots of modest homes of wood stoves, rough plastered walls decorated with religious icons, windows open to village and forest; and the dogs tramping through the dampness with their owners. The music by Ed Cortes reminds us that these are not ordinary villages and forests, but Italian ones. There is a certain sadness conveyed in the fact that old men, not long for this world, will take their secrets to the grave. Indeed, in one scene, a priest reassures one of the men that there is truffle hunting in heaven.

There is another sense of sorrow in this film. As in so many other industries, traditional ways of doing things are vanishing. The skills associated with hunting itself are not being learned by a younger generation. The old ways of marketing the truffles—individual hunters taking their product direct to local consumers in village farmers’ markets—are giving way to deals with middlemen who market the product worldwide. The high price of the product is inducing cutthroat competition—the poisoning of dogs by outsiders is not uncommon. Thus, the beauty of the cinematography and music is touched by melancholy.

I recommend this film, therefore, not only for its splendor but also because it con- stitutes a historical record of how life once was in Piedmont villages. It is something to contemplate as you enjoy a glass of Barolo along with pasta with shaved truffles.

1 According to Danilo Alfara, in a highly informative article, the truffle botanically is a species of mush- room. See https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-are-truffles-5179896.

2 They commanded roughly $1,600/pound in 2021; the price of unusually large, fist-sized bulbs can rise to more than $4,000/pound.

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