Wine consumers and producers make decisions partly on ratings of wine critics. Research into reliability (correspondence of repeated ratings of the same wines by one critic) and consensus (correspondence of ratings between critics or competitions) have yielded low estimates. However, Ashton (2013), looking at the consensus among only prominent critics of red Bordeaux, vintages 2004–2010, found a correlation of around 0.60. Here, I revisit these data, and extend the analyses to the years 2011–2016 for the same wines, but with additional new critics. Agreement among the critics (r = 0.57) of these new years is comparable to those found by Ashton (r = 0.60), with a slight upward trend. Overall, critics agree more about what they do not like. Regarding prices and ratings, wines score below-average ratings when they cost less than 35 euro, and higher ratings between 35 and 100 euro. In wines more than 100 euro there is no correlation between ratings and price. (JEL Classification: C99)

Competition medals are one of the most readily available sources of expert opinion to wine consumers, yet the “expertise” of competition judges and efficacy of medals have been questioned in the literature. This paper reevaluates the relevance of gold medals using data from ten competitions and scores from two leading wine publications. The analysis begins by exploring differences in gold medal award rates across competitions while holding wine quality constant through paired comparisons, which are found to be substantial. Next, the relevance of gold medals as indicators of wine quality is assessed, using the average scores from Wine Enthusiast and Wine Spectator as surrogates for quality. By itself, knowledge that a wine is a gold medal winner appears to have little relevance, as these wines do not score significantly higher than other medal winners. However, evidence suggests that golds from some competitions may be more relevant than others. (JEL Classifications: L15, L66)

This paper examines the level of consensus, or agreement, among the wine quality ratings of six prominent wine critics for seven consecutive vintages of red Bordeaux. Consensus, a critical component of expertise in wine evaluation, has important implications for consumers' reliance on critics' ratings in deciding which wines to purchase or consume. The principal analyses focus on a core set of wines in each year that were rated by all six critics. Additional analyses concern differences in agreement for classified growths vs. nonclassified growths and for critics of different nationalities (American, British, and French). The level of consensus among these prominent critics is contrasted with that among both wine professionals who are not prominent critics and professionals from several other fields. (JEL Classification: C93)