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Wine, Women, Men, and Type II Error*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2017

Jeffrey C. Bodington
Jeffrey C. Bodington*
Affiliation:
Bodington & Company, 50 California St. #630, San Francisco, CA 94111; email: jcb@bodingtonandcompany.com
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Abstract

More than forty published works show that women and men differ in their taste preferences for sweet, salt, sour, bitter, fruit, and other flavors. Despite those differences, dozens of state fair and other wine competitions determine winners' ribbons, medals, scores, and ranks by pooling the opinions of female and male judges. This article examines twenty-three blind wine tastings during which female and male judges scored more than nine hundred wines. Two-sample t-test results show that the gender-specific distributions of scores do have similar means and standard deviations. Exact p-values for two-sample chi-square tests show that the distributions of men's and women's scores are not significantly different, and exact p-values for likelihood ratio tests of Plackett-Luce model results show that the genders' preference orders are not significantly different. The correlation coefficient between women's and men's scores is weakly positive in 90 percent of the tastings. On that evidence, indications that the genders prefer different wines are difficult to detect. If such differences do exist, as the nonwine literature implies, the results of this analysis show that those differences are small compared to non-gender-related idiosyncratic differences between individuals and random expressions of preference. The potential for accept-a-false-null-hypothesis Type II error when pooling female and male judges' wine-related opinions appears to be small. (JEL Classifications: A10, C10, C00, C12, D12)

Keywords

menmixture modelpreference rankstatisticswine tastingwomen
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Wine Economics , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 161 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © American Association of Wine Economists 2017 

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Footnotes

*

The author thanks Professor Manuel Malfeito Ferreira of Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Universidade de Lisboa, for providing certain wine-tasting results; Professor Domenic Chicchetti of Yale University for encouraging consideration of correlation coefficients; and an anonymous reviewer for perceptive and constructive comments. All remaining errors are the responsibility of the author alone.

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