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An exploratory analysis of cross-country biases in expert wine reviews
Abstract
This paper examines whether online reviews by wine experts use different language to describe wines from different countries, and whether this reveals a certain bias. This is important because the language used in wine reviews can make a wine seem more or less appealing, and therefore may have a significant impact on consumers’ perceptions and purchase intentions. An automated content analysis was conducted of 28,858 reviews for top-rated wines that were published on the Wine Enthusiast magazine website. While the initial objective was to focus on the Old World versus New World dichotomy, the findings are more nuanced. Most of the differences that were found between reviews for wines from particular countries can be explained based on for example climate and whether or not the wine is purchased for immediate consumption. However, it was also found that reviews for wines from France, Italy and the United States use much more figurative language, and refer more often to the vineyard and the winemaking process, while this is much less the case for wines from Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Chile. This could indicate that reviewers have a bias based on their level of knowledge of, and/or interest in, particular countries.
... When assessors were aware of the origin of wines, they often described French and Swiss wines by adding positive sensory descriptors. Our results are comparable to the findings of Boon and Foppiani (2019), who found that online reviews by wine experts use different languages to describe wines from different countries. According to the authors, expert reviewers may have bias based on their level of knowledge and/or interest in particular countries. ...
... To counteract this contraction, it is of paramount interest for the wine industry to encourage purchase by understanding what factors influence consumers wine choices and refine communication strategies highlighting the product characteristics, their external elements (e. g. country of origin), and the arousal and pleasantness of the wine consumption experience (Vigar-Ellis, Pitt, & Berthon, 2015). The outline of a marketing strategy seems to be more relevant for companies producing New-World wines (Boon & Foppiani, 2019). ...
Classification trees are used to identify the internal and external attributes that drive the selection of low versus high-priced wines among Mexican consumers with at least a moderate grade of expertise or qualified knowledge in wines.
The wine market is expected to recover and growth in the following years. Although the market size of this market is small in Mexico; efforts are being made to promote national wines. To support these actions, the current study aims to explore consumers’ decision to pay for a low versus high priced wine according to wine attributes and external influences. A total of 290 wine consumers, knowledgeable about wines, participated in an online survey that took place in the Northwest part of Mexico. The relevance that eleven attributes have on the wine price was assessed through the application of classification trees, a method that has not been previously applied to explore wine purchase decisions. The result indicate consumers are mainly driven by price than the wine attributes. However, relevant attributes for consumers of low-priced wines (less than 20 USD) include “label information” “awards” and “previous tasting”. By contrast, purchase decision of consumers of pricey wines are mainly driven by “country or region of origin” and “vineyard recognition”. The study findings offer provide suggestions on the wine attribute wineries and marketers should focus on to meet the current consumers’ preferences depending on the price-sensitivity and wine knowledge of target segments.
This study addresses wine tasting experienced by tourists in the context of the worldwide renowned Port wine. A total of 824 online reviews posted about four major Port wine cellars in TripAdvisor were collected. Data were analyzed with text mining and topic modeling, and sentiment scores, as well as ratings, were also considered. Overall, results showed that guests were primarily attracted by the experience as a whole, including the tour and the wine culture and not just the wine tasting experience. Furthermore, six topics were found with associated main keywords and comprehending distinct groups of guests with different preferences. Three groups underlined tour and visiting experience, whereas two other groups were composed of enthusiastic wine fans, with one more focused on the wine/winery/cellar experience while the other enjoyed a diversified wine selection. Yet another group aggregated tourists who valued the food experience.
The amount of digital text available for analysis by consumer researchers has risen dramatically. Consumer discussions on the internet, product reviews, and digital archives of news articles and press releases are just a few potential sources for insights about consumer attitudes, interaction, and culture. Drawing from linguistic theory and methods, this article presents an overview of automated text analysis, providing integration of linguistic theory with constructs commonly used in consumer research, guidance for choosing amongst methods, and advice for resolving sampling and statistical issues unique to text analysis. We argue that although automated text analysis cannot be used to study all phenomena, it is a useful tool for examining patterns in text that neither researchers nor consumers can detect unaided. Text analysis can be used to examine psychological and sociological constructs in consumerproduced digital text by enabling discovery or by providing ecological validity. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
Wine tourism is becoming an increasingly important tourism niche with various regions competing for tourism dollars. It is often assumed that differentiation in the sector is region based. This research investigates the positioning narratives from websites of a sample of top wine tour service firms across the US and Australia. Analysis is undertaken using an innovative methodology that combines computer-based lexical analysis followed by hierarchical clustering on principal components. The research seeks to determine the extent to which identified clusters are region based and whether the positioning narratives on websites can provides useful clusters across regions. Results are reported, implications are discussed, limitations are noted and possible areas for further research are indicated.
Content analyses sway policy by describing the prevalence of mass media messages and implying effects. However, content-based research focusing ondynamic new media products such as websites, mobile applications, and video games presents methodological challenges. Our team recently conducted a large-scale content analysis exploring food marketing to children across media platforms, in which we captured and analyzed a variety of media-rich content. We consulted multiple sources to form our sampling frame, employed a complex sampling technique to allow for generalization of findings, used screen-capture software to record our exploration of media products, analyzed data using video coding software, and created a custom scale to determine the target audience of certain media products. We believe the steps we have taken may provide valuable insights into aspiring content analysts interested in studying media-rich content and address challenges that have been plaguing content analysts for the past two decades.
Purpose
– This introductory paper aims to place the contributions to this special issue within the context of the recent impact of globalisation on the wine industry, characterised by rapidly growing and evolving international markets, the expansion of New World wines on international markets, and the response of Old World rivals to New World competition.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper examines the new competitive environment in the wine industry created by globalisation and outlines the way in which the authors of the papers in this special issue have contributed to an understanding of that environment.
Findings
– This paper reflects a renewed academic interest in winemaking, one of the most dynamic and rapidly developing agricultural sectors.
Originality/value
– The paper hightlights how the authors of the papers in this special issue have contributed to an understanding of this new competitive environment.
Professional wine tasters use a technical language as a functional tool to describe and evaluate sensory attributes in wine. Communicating wine experiences is important to sommeliers, merchants and journalists to communicate with guests and consumers, to train personnel, to create wine lists, to evaluate wine and food combinations, and in branding wine. It is also an important tool for wine journalists to communicate with other professionals and consumers. This paper evaluates how common terms and concepts emerge and how they are communicated.
This paper argues that existing categories defining the geography of the world's wine industry, principally the Old World/New World dichotomy, are flawed. Not only do they fail to represent adequately the complexity of production and marketing in those two broad regions but also, crucially, they do not acknowledge the significant and rapidly expanding production and consumption of wine in ‘Third World’ developing countries. Rather than argue for the addition of a ‘Third World’ category, we instead use the lens of recent work on globalisation to argue that such production requires us to re-examine the dichotomous Old/New distinction which structures much of the thinking around the global wine industry. It also requires us to more closely link changes in patterns of global wine consumption with developments in global production. Changing geographies of wine production have been driven, to a large extent, by the rapid expansion of both local wealthy elites and burgeoning middle classes in countries such as China and India. This has resulted in the development of local wineries, large and small, throughout the developing world. It has also seen new flows of investment both from established wine regions to these new sites of production and from companies and individuals in the developing world who have invested in established wine regions, whether in France or Australia. Increasingly, the various worlds of wine will become more complex, accommodating new regions and also different forms of production and marketing, from traditional and modern artisanal production, closely tied to place and vintage, to large-scale industrial production for a mass market.
Nine wine experts tasted in replicate six Chardonnay wines that had been aged in oak barrels from different forests and/or species. They freely gave their descriptions in writing; the only instruction given was to underline three words or expressions that best characterized each tasted wine. The texts were submitted to an objective lexical analysis that quantified the important variation among the experts. In addition a matching task was performed by 117 assessors in which each assessor received from each expert six white cards and six yellow cards representing the descriptions of the six white wines and six red wines. The assessors were incapable of matching the descriptions for the same expert. Comparison between the observed distribution of the number of correct matching and the expected random distribution leads to significant differences, but with a tendency in the direction of false matching: the number of 0 and 1 correct matches is too high and, conversely, the number of 2, 3 and 4 correct matches is too low, in comparison to chance. Our conclusion is that, in order to become a useful technique in food science, the free-description of food qualities given by experts requires in-depth methodological examination.
We examine the demand for wines in Sweden using five years of weekly data on sales, advertising, and expert reviews. The effect of a favorable review peaks in the week after publication with an increase in demand of 6 percent, and the effect remains significant for more than 20 weeks. We find small demand-enhancing effects of neutral reviews and no evidence of important negative effects from unfavorable reviews. Restrictions on the state-owned monopoly retailer and the exogenous timing of a subset of the reviews support a causal interpretation of the effects of reviews on demand. (JEL D12, L66, L81, M31, M37)
This research investigates and compares some of the strategic choices made by small wine firms from two different New World wine producing countries, Australia and New Zealand, and one traditional wine producing region of France. This research was first conducted in 2003 in France with 98 wine firms being interviewed and then in Australia and New Zealand, with a total of 68 wine firms interviewed in 2004. In order to explain the differences in business practices, an effort to match wine sector perspectives and strategic management profiles is presented through a hierarchical cluster analysis. Some complementary explanations for the clusters found can be suggested: business practices are clearly dependent upon the business activity (bottled wine versus bulk wine), and the main goal of the owner-manager (improving business economic performance versus increasing market share). [EconLit classification: L190, L210]. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Agribusiness 22: 405-416, 2006.
There is little research on the emotions expressed by wine estate websites and whether the emotions conveyed are related to or can significantly predict the positive or negative sentiment articulated by these websites. In order to examine the emotions and sentiment of wine estate websites, content from the websites of 10 wine estates from 5 countries well known for their diverse and high-quality wines (South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, France, the USA) were selected and analyzed using IBM’s Watson. IBM’s Watson assessed the emotions and sentiment expressed on each website, and an output was then used in a multiple regression analysis with emotions predicting sentiment. The findings show that emotions are not related significantly to the overall sentiment on the winery websites. Finally, this research shows how wine estates and wine marketers can test whether the content of their websites mirrors the emotions that they desire to express to consumers and visitors, which can assure that appropriate expectations are set for the consumption experience.
The paper demonstrates a method for identifying and measuring the preferences and prejudices of wine critics. Employing expert rating scores from four wine critics assessing Australian premium wines, the analysis further illustrates the significant variability which exists among expert quality scores. A mean pairwise correlation of 0.435, an intraclass correlation of 0.426 and an alpha reliability of 0.748 are identified for 258 commonly assessed wines. These measures of rater consensus are lower than those identified from other wine studies and in other disciplines. Regression models are developed to explain the difference between each specific expert score and the average score of the other experts. The models explain the specific preferences of wine critics employing information which is readily available to consumers. For different experts, the cellaring potential of a wine, its vintage, the source region of the grapes and the variety/style of the wine are found to explain wine preferences to different degrees. The presented information may usefully be employed by consumers when confronted with conflicting wine scores. To aid with purchasing wine products consumers may wish to align their preferences with the identified preferences of specific wine critics.
The purpose of the article is to shed light on how experiences of sensory perceptions in the domains of
VISION, SMELL, TASTE, and TOUCH are recast into text and discourse in the genre of wine reviews.
Because of the alleged paucity of sensory vocabularies, in particular in the olfactory domain, it is
of particular interest to investigate what resources language has to offer in order to describe those
experiences.We show that the main resources are, on the one hand, words evoking properties that are
applicable cross-modally and properties of objects that range over more than one domain, and on the
other, vivid imagery that compares the characteristics of the wine with people, buildings, animals,
and the hustle and bustle of market places and other events. The second goal is to account for the
construals of the meanings of the expressions used in the recontextualization into written discourse
in the light of their apparent flexibility across the descriptions of the sensory experiences. In contrast
to a large body of the literature on sensory meanings in language, we argue that the descriptors of
properties such as sharp, soft, lemon, and cherry used to describe a wine’s qualities across the sensory
domains are not polysemous synesthetic metaphors, but monosemous synesthetic metonymizations,
more precisely zone activations. With regard to the imagery used, the construals represented cover
both similes, metaphorizations and metonymizations proper.
This article focuses on the efforts of wine journalists to disseminate information. A content analysis is undertaken of articles in specialist wine magazines and weekend newspapers. This analysis is in the form of a comparative study based on the wine information for the three southern hemisphere countries of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. When amount of column space devoted to each is assessed, it is evident that New Zealand, the smallest wine producing country of the three, is more positively favoured receiving a disproportionate amount of attention. However, an analysis of the information disseminated questions the value of the reviews.
This paper reports the results of an experimental study conducted to assess the effect of expert reviews, price, and country of origin, on consumers' evaluations of imported wine quality and value. The study revealed a main effect of expert reviews on quality and value perceptions, and that the effect of expert review is higher than the effects of price and country of origin. The study also revealed that country of origin effect is significant on perceived quality but not on perceived value. Moreover, the study revealed that the effect of country-of-origin information is significant when price information is also present, but becomes not significant when expert review information is added.
We propose a structural empirical approach à la Olley and Pakes (1996) to disentangle the effect of experts' grades from the effect of unobserved quality on the pricing of experience goods. Using a panel data set of 108 châteaux selling wine on the "en primeur" market of Bordeaux, we confirm that experts' grades affect producers' choice of "en primeur" price above the effect of unobserved wine quality. Our empirical results also show that failing to control for endogeneity caused by the omission of unobserved quality leads to over-estimate the influence of experts' grades on the "primeur" price.
This article provides an empirical review and synthesis of published studies that have used content-analysis methods. Harold Kassarjian's critical guidelines for content-analysis research were used to examine the methods employed in 128 studies. The guidelines were expanded by providing an empirical investigation of multiple dimensions of objectivity. Reliability issues were also assessed by examining factors central to the replication and interjudge coefficient calculations. The findings indicate a general need for improvement in the application of content-analysis methods. Suggestions for calculating reliability coefficients and for improving the objectivity and reliability of research are offered. Copyright 1991 by the University of Chicago.
We propose a structural empirical approach � la Olley and Pakes (1996) to disentangle the effect of experts' grades from the effect of unobserved quality on the pricing of experience goods. Using a panel data set of 108 ch�teaux selling wine on the "en primeur" market of Bordeaux, we confirm that experts' grades affect producers' choice of "en primeur" price above the effect of unobserved wine quality. Our empirical results also show that failing to control for endogeneity caused by the omission of unobserved quality leads to over-estimate the influence of experts' grades on the "primeur" price.
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