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American wineries have taken marketing steps toward attracting consumers. They employ tasting scores to augment and solidify market share. According to Oster (1999) and Porter (1985), competitive advantage comes from either cost advantages or product differentiation. American wineries use tasting scores they receive from experts as the basis for product differentiation and raising prices. To achieve competitive advantage, the product must be seen as important and an improvement in the market, while simultaneously lacking imitation. This article looks at how tasting scores given by wine experts may affect American firms' competitive advantage, barring entry by importing rivals, such as Australian firms. If these tasting scores provide product importance and improvements, while delivering a product that lacks imitation, competitive advantage may result. If importers to the US realise this, these firms can undermine American advantages, increase competition, and gain market share through their own competitive advantages.

As far as lasting of the great Bordeaux wines is concerned, each critic needs to identify his specificity if he is to maintain or increase market share. History shows, however, that each new critic has had to position himself in relation to the market leader, namely the American wine critic Robert Parker. The question of whether or not the differences in evaluation are real or simply part of the critics’ grading strategy can thus be raised. To illustrate this we shall examine the results of Dubourdieu and Parker's evaluation.

This paper aims to identify the potential conflicts that arise between the actual and the revealed preference of a panel of wine judges when the panel’s evaluation is derived by a linear aggregation of individual scores.

A standard axiomatic social choice theoretical model is used to derive and examine the findings.

The findings show that even with the application of a simple majority rule over the pairwise ranking of wines, preferences may be misrepresented by the ordinal ranking of the wine score aggregation.

A number of wine competitions and reviews, to date, use some form of linear aggregation to represent group preferences. Furthermore, tests surrounding wine judge performance are largely dependent on some underlying true measures usually derived from a linear aggregation. The results imply that care should be taken in these regards.

The purpose of this study is to assess the presence of deceptive advertising practices in wine retailers’ e-mails and, if identified, to analyze the extent and content of these deceptive advertisements.

The study follows an observational research design to examine the accuracy of two claims that were made in 258 marketing e-mails from two major wine retailers in New Jersey, USA: (1) that all wines have 90+ scores; and (2) that these wines are offered at a deeply discounted price.

The study found that only 3.9% of cases accurately supported both major claims made: the wines having 90+ scores and being offered at a discounted price. Both claims were inaccurate in 64.7% of cases. Nearly half (49.3%) of the advertised wines had concealed critic’s scores below 90 points. Recipients were told they could save 37.2% by purchasing from the advertising retailer, but they could have actually saved 12.7% more by buying the wines elsewhere.

The study’s limitations include the small sample size. Variations between different wine retailers and their advertising practices require further investigation.

Advertised discounts and scores may be inaccurate or incomplete, causing consumer confusion and disappointment, erosion of wine advertisements’ as well as wine retailers’ and wine experts’ credibility.

Deceptive advertising can erode consumer trust and lead to unfair practices. Consumers may make purchasing decisions based on misleading information. Deceptive practices create an uneven playing field, giving businesses that engage in them an unfair advantage, hindering market transparency and ethical businesses. Policymakers should develop regulations to protect consumers and ensure fair competition.

An investigation of deceptive advertising practices in the wine industry has not been done before. This exploratory study contributes to consumer awareness and highlights the importance of truthful and transparent marketing practices.

Calculating brand equity, the price differential that a branded product is able to charge compared to an unbranded equivalent, often suffers from a lack of a means to truly determine equivalence. Luxury wines have the benefit of an established measure of equivalency – the Parker score. Robert Parker’s influence as a tastemaker provides a point of comparison across brands. This study looks at brand equity of Bordeaux classified growth wines considering château brands, growths and vintages to illustrate the intangible value for the consumer.

Using price and wine-specific data from Wine-Searcher.com, an online database and search engine, an initial sample of 393 wines with Parker scores ranging from 72 to 100 is presented. A subset of perfect wines, with 100-point Parker scores, is also reviewed focusing on the great vintage of 2009.

The results indicate that brand equity in the luxury wine market exists. Not only is this true for the brand of a specific château, but there is also equity associated with the vintage and the growth.

This offers practical implications for brand managers in positioning their wines.

An analysis of luxury wines supports the financial perspective on brand equity, especially when there is a viable means of determining equivalence, such as the Parker score.

The complexity in determining the quality of a credence good like wine increases due to the lack of mandatory ingredient labeling. This has generated a significant information asymmetry in the wine market, leading consumers to delegate their purchase decisions to expert rankings and wine guides. This paper explores whether expert assessments reduce the information asymmetry caused by the absence of ingredient labeling in the wine market.

By employing analysis of variance (ANOVA) in a sample of 304 wines included in the Wine Guide of the Spanish Consumers Organization (OCU), this paper assesses the extent to which expert assessments based on sensory evaluations converge with the objective cues provided by laboratory analysis in wine quality evaluations.

Results reveal a mismatch between expert assessments and laboratory analyses. Chemical aspects such as SO₂ levels or volatile acidity, sensorial factors such as intensity and persistence, and extrinsic variables such as the region of origin or wine type play an important role in the quality ranking of wines.

These findings call for the inclusion of objective intrinsic cues in expert sensory assessments to provide consumers reliable information about wines and to resolve the apparent dissonances in wine quality assessments.

This study aims to characterize several wine consumer segments who were “likely” to sample (i.e. taste before purchasing) wine from vineyards using cover crops, a sustainable production practice that reduces herbicide applications, and identify those with a greater probability of being a viable target market based on survey responses.

A total of 956 wine consumers from the Mid-Atlantic and boarding US states were separated into segments based on an ECHAID (exhaustive Chi-square automatic interaction detector) classification tree from internet survey responses.

Out of the 12 created segments, 6 (n = 530, 72% of training data) contained participants who were at least 1.02 times (index score =102%) more “likely” to try the wine compared to the overall sample and were willing to pay $18.99 for a 750-mL bottle of the wine, which included a $1 surcharge to cover associated production costs. Of these, three (n = 195, 26%) had the greatest potential for which a marketing plan could be developed (index scores of 109%–121%), with over half in each segment willing to pay $20.99 for the bottle of wine, which could motivate growers to consider implementing this sustainable strategy.

Although several segments of participants were “likely” to sample the sustainably produced wine, an ECHAID classification tree allowed us to identify participants who would not pay $18.99 for a 750-mL bottle of wine, even after learning about the use of cover crops and the trade-off ($1 bottle surcharge). By narrowing the number of potential “likely” segments to those with a greater potential of sampling the wine, more purposeful marketing strategies can be developed based on demographics, attitudes, and behaviors defined in the model.

The purpose of this article is to review the use of the word terroir by print media in France using a multi-method approach. The objective is to uncover whether and how the media frames terroir-marketed products as being qualitatively superior to non-terroir products.

Every issue of five print magazines in France was analyzed over the period of one year. All references to terroir were coded as well as all tasting notes with and without terroir references. > 6,500 tasting notes and 800 uses of terroir in wine and food-related text from > 3,800 pages in 30 issues were identified and analyzed.

The results show that although it is not a frequently used word, terroir in tasting notes leads to significantly higher scores and prices for wines than when terroir is not included in the note. A further analysis reveals that terroir is most often related to subjective experiences of taste.

Wine managers should often use the word terroir in their press releases and communication pieces. However, the dimension of terroir that brand managers put forward in their communication pieces will influence the way in which the media frame their product.

Prior to this research there were no empirical results regarding how the media uses terroir. This research contributes to the growing body of research that seeks to understand the value of terroir as a marketing attribute.

This paper aims to provide insight into the three most prevalent expert wine rater sources and how they separately affect retail prices post-release across a sample of French and US wines from the 2012 vintage.

Empirical research using regression models built on data scraped from Web sources provides the source for the substance of the paper.

The findings suggest that all rating sources affect release price (approximately $3-4 per point), but more indicative of market performance, only Wine Advocate ratings significantly influence price change in the market post-release. Other results suggest some, but far from complete, consistency among raters. Red wines and French wines typically fetch better scores from the raters, and they are less subject to price drops in the marketplace.

The nature of the data does not allow for consumers’ individual difference characteristics, such as wine knowledge, among others, to be included as potential factors explaining why and when expert ratings influence consumers.

Third-party wine ratings do indeed matter both in terms of release price and post-release price performance. In particular, following release, Wine Advocate ratings provide the most influential quality signal in the marketplace.

Scrutiny on the manner in which ratings information is used by retailers is appropriate, given the influence such ratings have on consumers as demonstrated by their effects on market behaviors.

The research examines the top three US expert ratings and considers their consistency and impact, not just on release price but also on price following release, as a direct indicator of product performance in the marketplace.

Proceeding from studies that, at a general level, identify the extrinsic price cue as a mediator between a wine's perceived and intrinsic merit, the authors aim to report on a tasting‐room experiment conducted to determine the impact of the price cue on sighted ratings across categories of gender, age, and relative experience.

A total of 73 subjects assessed seven merlot wines, first blind and then sighted. During the sighted tasting, the only available cue‐information was the price per bottle. The seven price points ranged from the cheap (R25) to the expensive (R160).

Across all segmentations, the authors' analysis of sighted scores revealed the marked extent to which price effects demean the intrinsic merit of a wine. Older, more experienced and female strata appear to respond the most to price information; their respective model price effects are shown to increase by 57, 33 and 24 percent relative to their base comparators.

These findings challenge the dogma that unbiased sighted assessments are best conducted by self‐proclaimed wine experts who are older and more experienced; and suggest alternately, and perhaps heretically, that such assessments would be better conducted by younger, less experienced, non‐experts.