
How big data can help you pick better wine - erehweb
https://quid.com/feed/how-big-data-can-help-you-pick-better-wine
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dejv
The article display some cool use for NLP, but as a winemaker and wine judge I
find methodology funny and flawed.

You have to understand that wine descriptions are nothing more then marketing
message that have very little resemblance to what is inside of the bottle. It
would be interesting to see how those description change during the time as
this message is changing all the time to catch the current trend.

Wine market is actually quite simple: you have few tiers of wine/wineries:
from your basic mass market wines to mid tier to premium and ultra premium.
Each category have some price point and higher the price better fruit (should)
come to it.

There are differences in between the regions, but lower level wines are
usually same no matter the marketing message and premium wines are usually
very different and special in each own way anyway.

~~~
matwood
> Wine market is actually quite simple: you have few tiers of wine/wineries:
> from your basic mass market wines to mid tier to premium and ultra premium.
> Each category have some price point and higher the price better fruit
> (should) come to it.

Also important to note that more money == better wine is not linear. For me
(and most people) it does not take much money to get to a 'good' wine. Having
drank wines in all price ranges ($5 big bottles to $1000 Chateau
Margaux/Laffites - never had a DRC though not sure that's even possible now
with all the fakes out there, but I digress), I have hard time spending more
than $20 on a bottle nowadays and would prefer $10-$15.

~~~
dejv
For me the wine is all about culture. I do like to read the profiles on
wineries: history, how they work in vineyards, how they treat the wine in
cellar, why they choose of what they do. What is the history of the region and
how it was shaped during centuries (yeah, I am not really into new world
wines).

Then I have at least some background on what I am drinking and if I find some
winery I might like, I try to taste multiple wines and if I like them I just
keep buying it. During the years I found some good selection for any kind of
occasion. (Yes and most of the wines I buy are usually 10 - 15 USD + few more
expensive for some special occasions).

~~~
matwood
Ah yes, wine and history go together so well. I've found that many (most?)
people who like one like both. I took a wine tour once in Hvar, Croatia and it
was really a history tour of the island with wine mixed in.

I used to know a couple people where wine was a status symbol, and that's how
I got to taste some insane things. Personally, I look at wine as you do and
want to know about the history, culture, tradition, love (for lack of a better
word) that went into babying a finicky vine like the grape and turning it into
something that can be so complex and delicious.

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simonsarris
Part of the appeal of good wine for me is the social aspect of discovery, and
I don't think I'd want to trade that in for a technical one. I don't want a
perfect wine so much as I want to drink a sincere recommendation from a friend
or family member, and hopefully have that same wine again with them, and have
something to talk about. In fact when I'm with certain people, even bad wine
is fondly remembered. _" What was that chalk we were drinking last month... I
crave it when I think of you."_*

The funny thing about all this is that his big data quest for more good wine
was launched because of the same reason I enjoy wine: It was his brother-in-
law's recommendation that found him his favorite, not crunching the #cassis
#vanilla #persistentfinish numbers. And he's doing this to find bottles
_similar_ to the one from a beloved family member, most of which are far more
expensive (eyeballing the graph), but if I were him, I don't know if I could
ever find a better bottle than "my brother-in-law's wine." Isn't
sentimentality worth more than the data, especially when working with the most
fickle data-set of all?

Also, come on, don't make a post like this and not give us the list!

* (We were drinking Troublemaker, a Paso Robles blend, which I swear is 50% syrah and 50% limestone.)

~~~
gingerlime
You have to start somewhere, but I'd love to be able to get wine
recommendations based on my personal favourites + some heuristics that come up
with something less obvious or that I wouldn't pick otherwise.

I don't care so much about _his_ list, but being able to use the same engine
he did with my own starting point would be great.

On a side note, I wonder how the recommendations are influenced by the
audience. i.e. wine.com is presumably used by US customers, so perhaps it
could explain why French wines are described in certain ways compared to
California. But you might get the opposite if you look at a European website.

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sin7
In 2013, I got taste and aroma for around 1100 wines. I used the data to
create flavor profiles and predict the price based on the chemical
composition. In general, more expensive wines are more complex and the
predicted price matches the actual price quite well. This breaks down on the
extremes. Boxed wines such as Franzia and Vella are under priced. Not by much,
but their juice is closer to 4-5 dollar bottled wines. At the time of the
calculation a bottle of Franzia was around 2 dollars. So, it's a pretty good
deal. On the other side, most new world wines over 35 dollars are over priced.
There's nothing chemically different to the the wines just below 35 dollars.
There were a few wines in the middle that were way off. I remember a Clos Du
Bois was under priced by 7 dollars, but most of them were in the right range.
The biggest offenders were wines that built their reputation in a well known
appellation and moved a level higher. It's very common for wines to start in
Sonoma Coast or Carneros and end up with a California appellation.

~~~
cityhall
Did you try the underpriced ones, and were they good? A particular wine can be
complex but have some specific quality that makes it unappealing. I'd be
surprised if complexity is the main variable between different vintages of the
same wine that have very different prices.

~~~
sin7
I didn't try any. I drink very little wine. I did show the list around and no
one was surprised. It wasn't Kendall-Jackson that was under priced. It was
smaller wineries that had been getting solid reviews. There must have been
some surprises, but I knew very little of wine back then. I also knew very
little about machine learning, R or anything else. I knew enough to use Random
Forests, R for graphing and the opinion of others to judge the results.

I tried finding the file with the list of all the wines and the predicted
prices. I didn't even know enough to name the file correctly.

I think the large companies are very consistent with their product. They have
many sources for their juice and because of that their product will be more
average. The small companies can have years where they do everything right and
create a great product, but it's not like they can just change their price to
reflect the better quality.

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daxorid
"better" wine?

[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-
ta...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-
science-analysis)

[http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamo...](http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html)

~~~
graeme
Have you seen this?

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/05/daily-c...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/05/daily-
chart-11)

It defies common sense to think all wine is equal quality. The fact that
there's much nonsense in the wine world doesn't mean it's _all_ nonsense.

We'd need to see much stronger evidence than what has been presented.

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NikolaeVarius
They were trying to figure out Grape type and origin country not "quality".
And even then was less than 50% accurate.

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gjem97
I actually like this analysis. I think there's something there. But man-oh-
man, this is about as "small data" as it gets. Has "big data" become just a
short name for an assorted bag of statistical tools?

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socalnate1
>>>Has "big data" become just a short name for an assorted bag of statistical
tools?

Yes. Or as @mhoye on twitter put it: "FACT: most "big data" is actually two
small datas standing on each other shoulders wearing a trenchcoat and
sunglasses."

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tlanc
Does it do better than Ashenfelter's simple formula:
[https://www.betterment.com/resources/investment-
strategy/beh...](https://www.betterment.com/resources/investment-
strategy/behavioral-finance-investing-strategy/human-vs-algorithm-investing-a-
lesson-from-wine-country/)

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kumarski
Or make it.... [http://avawinery.com](http://avawinery.com)

