Wine-Searcher.com has a taxonomy for how they search and display results for wines.  For the free listings, check out the following URL which explains how to add a wine result list to your site. For example, to find Chataeu Mouton Rothschild, 2000 in the US and list the results in US Dollars,  you’d add the following link:

http://www.wine-searcher.com/find/Mouton+Rothschild/2000/USA/USD

It is my hope to add these results to the wine recaps so that others may find/purchase/consume wines we’ve had at our dinners.

With the WinePod, slightly bigger than an iPod :-), and capable of producing cases of your own wine.

The Oxford Companion to Wine – here’s a write-up from Slate. 800 pages of goodness!

I did a bit of Internet digging and found the full articles referred to in the previous post:

American Association of Wine Economists – Journal site
What Determines Wine Prices: Objective Vs. Sensory Characteristics – PDF of study
Assessing the Effect of Information on the Reservation Price for Champagne: What are Consumers Actually Paying for? – PDF of study

If anything, the objective/sensory study proves something we’ve known about marketing all along: the sizzle sells the steak, no matter how good the steak might be instrinsically.

If you subscribe to The Economist, check out page 81 of this week’s (October 14 – 20, 2006) edition.  Two studies were released in The Journal of Wine Economics.  In one study, they looked at a price equation to compare 1,000 bottles of Bordeaux and Burgundy wines tasted blindly by experts and found that the price of wine is largely determined by objective standards such as color, ranking and vintage rather than simply by taste and smell.  In another, 120 people were observed during their bidding on non-vintage champagne after tasting it blind, after inspecting only the bottle, and after tasting it when seeing the bottle, and the bidding was 33% higher when tasters could see the bottle.