

Why does wine brand popularity not follow a power law distribution? - kurige
http://www.gamedevblog.com/2011/04/what-is-it-about-wine.html
Short blog article posing that exact question. The article is otherwise devoid of facts or hypothesis, but I'm very much interested in hearing HN's thoughts, since it's a very interesting question.
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tgammm
Because running a winery that produces distinctive wines and having that
winery crank out hundreds of millions of cases a year isn't that feasible.
It's not like Coke where you can just produce more of the same product with
the same process without affecting the character of.

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bhousel
Wine popularity absolutely does follow a power law distribution. The leading
brands are ones like Yellowtail, Woodbridge, Beringer, Cavit, and Sutter Home.

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dbfclark
The quick answer is "no, it doesn't, nothing does":

<http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html>

The better answer emerges if you think about the example a little more
closely. The big power law brands driven by customer appreciation are in media
-- people love Lady Gaga (say), so she sells gazillions. Nobody loves
yellowtail or sutter home. Many people love Screaming Eagle or Chateau Lafite.
However, wine is an agricultural product; you cannot produce more bottles of a
great wine than you can grow in some very particular fields in a year. The way
scary hit-driven industries work is that you sell things way above marginal
cost to everyone who wants them; in wine, since there's actually scarcity,
very few people who love a brand can get as much as they want of it, so the
prices at the top are insane (recent vintage screaming eagle is indicated at
$2-3k per bottle), but the brands are smaller.

I'd guess the way to think of it is like the music industry before recording
devices or electricity -- sure there are stars, but because supplies are
limited nobody can by a megastar.

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bhousel
I don't think you read the original blog post...

But good for you, since it was crap and my only goal in that comment was to
point that out quickly and politely.

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dbfclark
At the peril of being annoying long after the fact, I did read the post, and
he does have a point that's a little deeper than your rejoinder: wine does not
have the competition-destroying superstar effect we see in categories with
less constrained supply. Your examples are not comparable to the kind of
market position the players mentioned in the original post have. The favorite
brands do not drive out the smaller players. Is that a "power law" or not,
well, hard to say; if it's purely size-based, sure, but if we're talking about
the way that a big brand dominates a market, no, there is no such thing in
wine.

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triviatise
wine is probably more like cereal. In any case there were about 300 million
cases sold in the US in 2008

Here are rankings of the top wine producers by case in 2008

[http://www.winebusiness.com/wbm/?go=getArticle&dataId=54...](http://www.winebusiness.com/wbm/?go=getArticle&dataId=54412)

E&J gallo - 68 million constellation - 59M The wine group 44M

