Beyond the medals: an experimental analysis of consumer preferences for wines judged by experts

This paper examines the relationship between professional expert judgments and consumer utility in a market characterized by high information asymmetry: the wine industry. This study investigates whether consumers' intrinsic preferences, elicited under unbiased conditions, align with professional expert classifications. While previous literature investigates the role of expert ratings and medals as quality signals influencing consumer choice, existing studies mainly focus on wines that remain within the competitive ranking system. This paper contributes to this literature by explicitly incorporating wines that are excluded from expert certification, namely, wines disqualified from competitions due to major sensory flaws. This paper accessed confidential data from a major wine competition to define three categories of wines (gold medal, non-medalists and wine disqualified from the competition for major flaw) and conducted a lab experiment with 125 participants. In a blind tasting, participants evaluated wines from each category. This paper found a substantial divergence between professional expert judgments and consumer preferences, revealing that consumers largely fail to perceive, or are unconcerned by flaws that professional wine experts at an international wine competition consensually consider severe enough to be disqualifying. While wine professional experts appropriately act as market gatekeepers, the results reveal that expert-based quality signals may not consistently align with consumer hedonic valuation. This disconnect suggests that wines consensually deemed flawed by professional experts can nonetheless find commercial viability in the market, as these flaws are not necessarily disqualifying from a consumer perspective. It indicates a potential misallocation of resources in the wine market driven by professional expert opinion rather than consumer utility.