The wine industry in the United States has grown tremendously over the past few decades, from fewer than 1,000 wineries in 1980 to upward of 8,500 today. The growth has occurred over a period that has seen substantial changes in the structure of the wine industry, the modes of distribution available to wineries, and the regulations governing them. Most economic research, however, has focused on supply relations between wineries and wine grape growers rather than between wineries and their downstream markets. In this article, we examine wineries' contracting behavior with downstream distributors and the effects of industry structure, winery organizational structure, and state laws regarding direct shipment and distribution franchise laws. (JEL Classifications: D23, L14, L22, L66)

The prior literature disregards the time-varying conditional correlation and its importance for portfolio diversification when it assesses the risk-return profile of fine wine with that of stocks. To address this limitation, this paper applies a dynamic conditional correlation model and examines the co-movements between fine wine and stock prices in the United Kingdom (UK). Based on monthly data from January 2001 to February 2014, we find that fine wine is a hedge against movements in UK stocks. Nevertheless, it cannot act as an effective safe haven during market turmoil. Those findings have noteworthy implications for financial advisors and portfolio managers who are interested in alternative investments. (JEL Classifications: G1, G11, Q1, Q14)

This study examines a framework developed by Cardebat, Figuet, and Paroissien in a 2014 Journal of Wine Economics article for identifying the impacts of both objective and subjective quality on wine prices. We recognize how various specifications are observationally equivalent and that the interpretation of model estimates depends crucially on the posited assumption for the relation between price and objective and subjective quality. The proposed framework is applied to Australian premium wines. Results indicate that the price impact of expert personal opinions is similar to the impact of objective quality as estimated via weather, vintage, and producer fixed effects. The relative importance of objective quality compared with subjective quality depends crucially on the ability of expert scores to accurately reflect objective quality. (JEL Classifications: C21, Q11, Q54)

The value of expert opinion for establishing prices in the Bordeaux futures market is analyzed. The expert opinions examined are the wine quality ratings provided by two of the world's foremost wine experts, Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson, for more than 1,700 red Bordeaux wines over the period 2004–2012. The results show that the experts' ratings have both a statistically and practically significant impact on prices after controlling for the effects of other known determinants of price. Thus, expert opinion has significant value in this setting. The results further show that although Parker's impact on prices is significantly greater than Robinson's, combining the quality ratings of both experts has a significantly greater impact than Parker's ratings alone. As hypothesized, the strength of the results differs for wines produced in different regions of Bordeaux because of differences in the availability of other quality-related information. All results are robust to several alternative sample specifications and other research design choices. (JEL Classifications: C52, G13, L11, L15, M21)

The European Union's (EU) long-standing financial support for its wine industry has been nontrivial but very difficult to estimate. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) generic producer support estimate methodology has been able to capture some of the supports, but it excludes such measures as subsidized distillation of low-quality wine, grants to promote wine generically, protection via import tariffs, and grubbing-up premiums. Nor does the OECD disaggregate EU supports to individual member countries. This article provides a new set of more complete estimates of support to EU wine producers. It also reveals how unevenly those supports are spread across EU member countries. The new estimates suggest that during 2007–2012, annual assistance amounted to approximately 700 euros per hectare of vines or 0.15 euros per liter of wine produced in the EU as measured at the winery gate. That is equivalent to a nominal rate of direct plus indirect producer assistance of approximately 20%. (JEL Classifications: F14, H25, L66, Q18)