Do Wine awards reflect consumers’ taste ?

To award a medal to a wine, the judges at wine competitions must answer two consecutive questions: 1) Is the wine free of major flaws? If the answer is no , the wine is discarded. Conversely it is evaluated a second time to answer the second question: 2) Is the wine good enough to be awarded a medal? Thus, some wines are rejected from wine competitions because of major flaws, while others are awarded medals. While much has been written about the impact of awards on consumer purchasing decisions, little is known about what happens after tasting an award-winning wine. Do the consumers appreciate the superior quality "certified" by the experts? Do the experts' tastes and their perceptions of wine flaws match the tastes of consumers? The gap in the literature is due to an asymmetry of information: while consumers are informed about which wines have been awarded a medal, they cannot know which wines have not been deemed good enough to receive a medal, or even to be evaluated because they have been discarded for major flaws. Only the wine producers and the competition organizers possess this information, and they do not make it public. For the purpose of this research a major wine competition shared this information with us. Thanks to this unique collaboration, we designed a lab experiment (n=125) to elicit the preferences of untrained wine consumers on two sets (white, red) of three wines (gold medal, no medal, discarded for major flaw) under blind tasting conditions. The participants reported their quality perception, hedonic ratings, and willingness to pay for the wines and were asked to comment on each of them (free comment). Our research reveals inconsistencies between the perceptions of wine competition judges and consumers regarding the wines in their evaluations. It is not possible to ascertain which wines have received a wine award based on the judgments of consumers alone. Practical implications of our findings include the confirmation that untrained consumers are not able to perceive or are not concerned by wine flaws as are wine experts. While wine experts can serve as gatekeepers, there is still a significant market opportunity for wines that are considered flawed by wine experts