A New Method to Obtain a Consensus Ranking of a Region's Vintages’ Quality

An impartial assessment of the quality of the wine produced over the years in a region (vintage quality) is an essential tool for producers, consumers, investors, and wine researchers to understand factors influencing quality and make purchasing or investing decisions. However, scoring the overall wine quality over the years does not necessarily produce a consensus of which year or years are best. Several critics, magazines, and organizations publish vintage charts that assign a score to each vintage, representing the corresponding perception of the wine quality. Often, the scores given by different institutions reveal little consensus with respect to the relative quality of the vintages. In this work, we propose the utilization of a rank aggregation method to combine a collection of vintage charts for a region into a ranking of the vintages that represents the consensus of the input vintage charts. As a result, we obtain an impartial ranking of the vintages that represents the consensus of an arbitrary number of independent vintage charts. We illustrate the method with the scores from three wine regions. The proposed method produces a ranking of vintage-to-vintage quality that represents an impartial consensus of a collection of independent sources, each using a different rating format, scale, or classification. Such a ranking has the potential to be useful for the research community, which needs a relative measure of wine production quality over the years. Therefore, we make publicly available a software tool that implements the method (Borges, 2011). (JEL Classification: C38, C61, C88)