Wine + Economics = Good Times
by MaxPower
I found a post via a couple of financial blogs I frequent about a guy in NY who invited his friends over for a wine party. But this wasn't a normal wine party, they wear blind folds and test the wines out, giving them a score out of 20. Beyond just determing the best wine, he helpfully plotted all the price vs. scores on a scatterplot to determine the best bang for the buck (economists love making charts).
For those of you who don't want to click through for the conclusion here it is:
If you plug these numbers into a correlation calculator, you actually get a negative correlation of -0.2: the higher the price, the worse the wine, on average.
While that is true looking at the scatterplot, I would suggest that only having 2 expensive wines over $50 and a gap between $32 and $50 wines may not be a representative sample, and may say more about the attendee's wine picking ability than the actual quality of expensive wines. And we also don't know if there may be a bias towards those wines sampled early or late, before or after the guests to the party are hammered. I do agree with this conclusion though:
"price is not a significant predictor of wine score (quality)"