Over at the Cyberlibris blog, Eric has a very nice post comparing economist Orley Ashenfelter's econometric
approach to evaluating wine and the gustatory approach of former lawyer
Robert Parker.
Ashenfelter decries what he perceives to be a sense of elitism in the wine industry: "Writers whose palates we respect act as if they were able to pick out the qualities in young wines that will emerge a decade or more from now,". Parker Jr., an influential wine critic, calls the professor's methods "Neanderthal," not to mention "ludicrous and absurd". ...
According to [University of Maryland Law Professor Garret Power], the conflict between the two men is obviously tense. However, he thinks that the disagreement between the two men is in fact a profound professional disagreement between a judge (Parker was a law student at the University of Maryland) and an economist. For Power, Robert Parker is a wine judge: "He employs the method of the common law. He sniffs, sops, and spits his way through a number of cases each week." New evidence will make him change his mind. Ashenfelter is undoubtedly a wine economist. To put it again in Power's words, "he simplifies the world of wine and gauges the quality of a vintage on the basis of variables that are subject to objective measurement."I used to subscribe to both Ashenfelter and Parker's newsletter; I still subscribe to Parker's pay web site. As between the two, I found Parker's tasting notes far more useful; if I were collecting wine for investment purposes, however, Ashenfelter's price data and econometric analysis would be very useful. In any event, my all time tasting triumph came in a seminar given by Ashenfelter: I correctly identified the vintage and appellation of a wine that turned out to be a 1973 Latour.
