Dear Economist,

I regularly have dinner with a friend, alternating between his house and mine. My difficulty is that he is a wine snob. He is always puffing about the expensive wines he brings over to my place, and is then sniffy about the offerings I take round to his. I don’t know much about wine, and I cannot afford to satisfy his taste for fancy vintages. This is starting to spoil what are supposed to be pleasurable evenings. Please help.

Oliver Morris, south London

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Dear Mr Morris,

I sympathise with your plight, being a penny-pinching wine duffer myself. A friend once handed me a wine guide and suggested that I consult it before I next brought a bottle round.

But I now have a resource unavailable to the ordinary citizen: the newly published Journal of Wine Economics. The first edition of the journal confirms what I have long suspected: wine is a racket.

An analysis of wine prices by two French researchers shows that prices are driven by the label on the bottle, which gives the year and the origin of the wine. The fact that one wine is rated as excellent and another as mediocre by a panel of experts in a blind taste test makes very little difference to the price.

The authors comment, “As the jury grade seems a priori a reasonable measure of quality, one might have expected this variable to have a more important influence on prices.”

If the label is all that matters, a simple strategy suggests itself. Steam the labels off the empty bottles he leaves at your place and attach them to the bottles you take when it is your turn to go round to him. Since, according to the JWE, most people actually prefer cheaper wines in blind tests, you may even be doing him a favour.

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