Is a 91 points wine really different from a 89 points wine? Which wines are under-priced rela- tive to their quality? Answers to these questions are important for producers and consumers. This paper addresses these questions by constructing a wine rating system based on scores assigned by a panel of wine experts to a set of wines. Following a standard rating method- ology, wines are classified in ranked disjoint quality equivalence classes using measures of statistically and commercially significant score differences. The system is implemented using data of the ”Judgment of Paris” wine competition, Bordeaux en-primer expert scores and prices, and expert scores and price categories of a set of Italian wines. The proposed wine rating system is shown to provide an informative assessment of wine quality for producers and consumers, as well as a flexible template for wine competitions.

Keywords: Wine Ratings, ANOVA, Quantile Regressions, Finite Mixture Models.