The consumer’s problem in forming a willingness to pay (WTP) for wine, especially fine wine, is one of the thorniest in wine market analysis. The problem raises good questions from the philosophical—What does it mean to know something? How can we know a wine and communicate such knowledge?—to the practical—Is the wine market smaller because of this problem? If so, how much? Much of the problem involves the value and validity of wine ratings.
Because of the consumer’s problem, the content of wine economics—relative to viticulture or oenology or other fields that study wine—has given particular prominence to the role of experts and their ratings. Ashenfelter has characterized the role of experts as one of the two central questions in wine economics (2016), and one can imagine that it is at least as important in wine economics as in other areas of cultural economics (e.g., Ginsburgh 2016). Among the most popular themes in wine economics has been the determination of fine wine prices. Among the most prominent questions in that literature is the impact of expert ratings, although the evidence of a relationship is mixed and limited to a narrow, though financially important, segment of the wine market—results from commercial auctions of classified Bordeaux (e.g., Oczkowski and Doucouliagos, 2014; Luxen, 2018) which provide rare published data on “market-clearing” transactions. Despite that limitation, the attention ratings have received even in that context is good reason to scrutinize what is behind them.