Crowdsourcing the Assessment of Wine Quality - Evidence from Vivino

Wine consumers have mainly relied upon prices and professional critics’ reviews to infer wine quality. Crowdsourcing platforms, such as Vivino, have introduced a new source of information, leveraging the opinions from large numbers of amateur wine reviewers and averaging their ratings. We assess how well the 'wisdom of the wine-loving crowds' matches the 'conventional wisdom' of the wine-world by analyzing approximately 85,000 Vivino ratings for a portfolio of Bordeaux red wines. We find that ratings from Vivino amateurs correlate substantially with ratings from critics and are sensitive to weather conditions in similar ways that past literature has shown for auctioned prices of wines. However, amateurs’ correlations with critics are on average lower than those among critics. We show that this is partly due to differences in scope: amateurs focus on the immediate pleasure whereas critics focus on the potential of a wine once it has matured. Our analysis also suggests that global warming may already have a discernible negative effect on wine quality as ratings are negatively affected by increased temperatures late in the growing season. In sum, our results demonstrate that crowdsourced ratings are a reliable source of information that can generate valuable insights for both consumers and producers