Journal of Wine Economics最新文献

The article addresses how merchants and wine producers interacted while oscillating between competition and collaboration in their internal relations. Spanning a period of more than a century, it addresses three chronological periods: 1900–1940, 1940–1994, and 1994 to the present. In the first, producers were able to forge a common front against the merchants in the shape of the Koöperatieve Wynbouwers Vereniging van Suid-Afrika, which was granted devolved regulatory powers over distilling wine in 1924 and then all wine in 1940. In the second, the antagonism between good and distilling producers was sublimated at a time of relative prosperity, while the merchants engaged in fierce competition. In the final phase, the regulatory system imploded while the export market re-emerged. Quality producers found common ground in appealing to terroir, whereas marginal producers supplied merchants and supermarkets with low-priced bulk wines.

Using newly released public data on beer prices in the state of California, we construct a large dataset (approximately 2 million observations) that includes beer prices and packaging configurations. We merge this dataset with brewery attributes and county demographics to explore pricing differentials across California, the U.S.’s largest brewing state. We provide evidence of potential pricing-to-market conducted by macro breweries across the three-tier distribution system where craft breweries do not. In addition, we describe package attributes that exhibit price differentials across brewery types. We make the cleaned data available to the public and provide avenues for future research that may be addressed with this new data.

This paper examines wine output and slave labor productivity in the Dutch and British Cape Colony, leveraging annual tax censuses. We document a substantial increase in wine production, but, despite substantial institutional changes over more than a century, we find surprisingly stable median wine yields. Exploiting the farm-level nature of our data, we observe increasing heterogeneity in wine yields, suggesting that some farmers were able to realize productivity increases. We show that efficient slave labor utilization was a critical driver of productivity enhancement, largely unaffected by external factors.

By analyzing more than 1,400 expert tasting notes, we assess the so-called gender profile of Bordeaux wines. We identify 329 gender-related wine descriptors, with a good balance between masculine and feminine descriptors. Some wines and vintages are described as more feminine than others, but no clear trend over time emerges. Our regression analysis further reveals that more feminine wines receive similar ratings and sell at similar prices as their more masculine counterparts, but they are perceived as having a much more limited aging potential.

In 1790, the Revolutionary government expropriated most property owned by the Church and its entities, and sold it by auction. This effectively ended the centuries-old participation of the Church in wine production in France. Focusing on Burgundy, this article sketches the contours of the sale of vineyards and other wine-related property owned by the Church. It shows that auctions fetched prices well above the assessed value of the properties that were sold and speculates on the reasons.