2.1. Online Wine Quality Evaluation Providers
Wines satisfy the criteria of commodities consumed as foods or beverages, but, at the same time, they are also categorized as a product in a highly specialized professional territory. That is why there are professional information providers of wine evaluation results and reviews.
This section provides a comprehensive review of some of the world’s leading wine quality information-providing websites: Robertparker.com, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, Decanter.com and Vivino.com.
Robert Parker, U.S. wine critic, started his own wine-related business in 1978 by releasing his first offline wine review, Wine Advocate, and started an e-business by introducing an online version of his magazine, Robertparker.com, in 2000 (
Figure 1). In 2001, he teamed up with wine experts to make better and more effective collective information and evaluation reports on wines. His wine evaluation system employs a 50–100 point quality scale, well-known as Parker Points; this is influential in worldwide wine buying and is therefore a major factor in setting the prices for newly released Bordeaux wines especially. This made him the most widely known and influential wine critic in the world [
19].
Although he retired in 2019 and the number of Robertparker.com’s wine reviewers is currently 10 [
20], Parker’s wine evaluation system is still so famous and well-known that it is based on the individual professional’s wine-related intelligence [
19]. With his name on the domain, Robertparker.com introduces the method of his (now his team’s) wine quality evaluation: single-blind conditions (meaning that the same types of wines are tasted against each other and the producers’ names are not known). The ratings reflect an independent and critical look at the wines. Neither price nor the reputation of the producer/grower affects the rating in any manner [
20].
Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, and Decanter.com are other wine information providing websites with wine expert panels’ wine ratings. They have also transferred their contents from offline magazines to online websites. Vivino.com is a wine review website where the reviews are reported, collected, and distributed by public individuals.
Wine Spectator, known as a lifestyle magazine that focuses on wine and wine culture, contains from 400 to more than 1000 wine reviews from professional editors with their tasting notes and drink recommendations for each issue, which consist of wine ratings based on a 50–100 scale and tasting notes (
Figure 2). It was founded as a San Diego-based tabloid newspaper in 1976 and it was ranked by the Luxury Institute as the #1 business and consumer publication among wealthy readers in 2008 [
21].
The number of Wine Spectator’s senior wine tasters is 11, and with their tasting results, Wine Spectator reports the reviews of more than 15,000 wines each year in blind tastings with strict standards relying on the proven ability and experience of editors as tasters and critics. Its online site reaches more than 3 million readers worldwide. Under its 100-point scale standard, wines, reviewed from the bottle in blind tastings, are given a single score. A score given as a range (e.g., 90–94) indicates a preliminary score, usually based on a barrel tasting of an unfinished wine [
22].
Wine Enthusiast Magazine was first published in 1988 as a guide to the latest wine trends, ratings and reviews, food and travel, award-winning commentary, and more. It was conceived and executed by a team of editors based in New York, California, Washington, France, England, and Italy (
Figure 3). This website insists that while each editor offers a unique set of expertise, personality, and perspective to the Wine Enthusiast team, the editors are all united by one mission: to taste, enjoy, and communicate their love of the best wines, spirits, and food in the world to readers in a fresh and accessible way [
23]. They do not focus on wine only. Wine Enthusiast’s aim is to provide consumers with information on the world of wine and spirits, review hundreds of wines each month, and provide comprehensive coverage of wine and lifestyle topics peripheral to wine, such as entertainment, travel, restaurants, and notable sommeliers. The Wine Enthusiast is published 14 times a year. It is known that there are over 800,000 readers worldwide [
24].
Decanter is a wine and wine-lifestyle magazine, published in about 90 countries on a monthly basis. The magazine includes industry news, vintage guides, and wine and spirits recommendations (
Figure 4).
Following the success of wine columns in British newspapers, the magazine was founded in London in 1975 [
25]. It is the oldest consumer wine publication in the United Kingdom. As of 2011, it was published in 91 countries, including China as its last addition in 2005. Columnists and regular contributors include several Masters of Wine. The magazine mainly focuses on wines available in the United Kingdom’s market. While it is aimed at consumers, a significant part of its audience also consists of both traders and producers [
26]. Additionally, three experts in their field review chosen flights of wines through Decanter.com’s famous panel tastings. Its content includes news, topical dissertations, travel surveys, interviews, analysis, and market reports [
27]. Differently to other magazines, which focus on many wines from various regions and countries, Decanter.com issues offer in-depth reviews of wines from two regions at a time [
25].
The magazine launched its website, Decanter.com, in 1999. The website is considered as a leading online wine magazine [
28]. Among its services, it offers a wine investment guide in conjunction with Berry Bros. & Rudd [
29]. Its subscribers are generally younger than those of similar publications, with 41% of readers being under 45 years old [
28]. With its professional wine-related assets, Decanter founded a famous wine competition, the World Wine Awards (DWWA), in 2004. It is known as the world’s biggest wine competition with over 15,000 entries per year. The results of the competition are published on Decanter.com and its magazine in the August edition [
26].
Vivino.com is an online wine community, database, and mobile application where users can buy, rate, and review wines (
Figure 5). Vivino was founded in 2010 by Heini Zachariassen and Theis Sondergaard who knew very little about wine and used that ignorance in the development of an smart phone application for ordinary people. As of 2018, vivino.com had a wine database containing over 9 million different wines, and had 31 million users [
30]. In July 2013, the database had 1 million wines [
31], and in December 2018, the database has 10 million wines, 37.5 million wine reviews, and 33.9 million users. Vivino.com’s headquarter is in Copenhagen, Denmark, but the company also has offices in the USA, Ireland, Ukraine, and India [
30].
2.2. CI as Online Wine Quality Evaluation Providers
One of the elements of CI, the opinion leader’s review, influences the consumer purchasing process [
32]. Are the wine quality information-providing websites CI? Researchers have been investigating the characteristics or conditions of CI from various perspectives: mass collaboration, the information quality guarantee, how to improve the decision-making of CI, and how to avoid the biases from the decision-making of individual human beings.
First, some researchers focus on mass collaboration as a condition for CI. Tapscott and Williams required four conditions for a CI platform: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally [
33]. Investigating the above conditions, we believe that all of the wine evaluation sites we have explored satisfied CI conditions in Tapscott and Williams’s perspectives.
Second, Lichtenstein and Parker [
34] insisted that researchers generally agree that the core information quality criteria for an information resource comprise as CI [
34,
35,
36,
37]. They summarized seven conditions from several studies: purpose, authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, coverage, and accessibility. These criteria can be used to judge that a wine evaluation site can be a CI platform and an information quality guarantee. With the above conditions, we could not agree that Vivino.com has authority because it provides wine ratings from ordinary people’s reviews.
Third, Collective Intelligence has been regarded as a tool to avoid the biases from the decision-making of an individual person. Bonabeau [
38] described how to mitigate the biases through the use of three Collective Intelligence approaches: outreach, additive aggregation, and self-organization. Outreach is defined as people or groups who traditionally were not included in the company’s decision-making process. Additive aggregation means organizations that can collect information from myriad sources and then perform some kind of averaging. Self-organization is defined as mechanisms among group members which can result in the whole being more than the sum of its parts [
4,
38].
With the above conditions, it can be said that the wine evaluation sites follow the future direction of CI in terms of efforts to increase the number of evaluation professionals, or to expand the professional and reliable ability to rate the wine. In conclusion, Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast and Decanter.com, of the wine evaluation sites that were mentioned above, seem to have the requirements of a CI platform.
2.3. Profit Model as E-Business in Wine CI
What kind of profit models do wine information sites have? E-commerce, a system of selling wine itself online, rather than selling the contents of wine appraisal information provisions for a fee, is attracting attention in the academic field. Some studies recently explore the key success factors for wine e-commerce, such as time delays and spatial arrangements. [
39] Some studies focus on the consumer behavior in wine purchasing situations [
40].
However, fundamentally, evaluation information on wine sites is being sold as paid content. This indicates that wine evaluation is a source of revenue for the information providers. In addition, the wine information evaluation site features an e-business through various profit models, such as selling wine and beverage related items, including wine accessories, importer connections and advertising, holding wine events, and so on.
Robertparker.com, Wine Spectator.com, Wine Enthusiast.com, and Decanter.com have used “Freemium” pricing. Simon coined Freemium from free memberships including special paid services [
41]. For example, on Robertparker.com, the reader can access more than 300,000 professional tasting notes, Wine Journal, Hedonist’s Gazette’s restaurant reviews, and direct chat with reviewers via the Bulletin Board with a free membership. However, if anyone pays 99 US dollars, he/she can gain access to a matter of tasting events worldwide, global benefits, the Robert Parker mobile app, RP Cellar access, trade directory, and vintage charts. Further, in the case of Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast, subscribers can receive a predetermined amount of magazine issues based on the subscription price paid. Therefore, the researchers can regard Wine Spectator, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, and Decanter.com as e-business companies with a profit model in CI.
2.4. Correlation between Quality Evaluation and Price
The study of the relationship between Collective Intelligence and price can be roughly classified into two types. Traditionally, there are studies examining the relationship between quality and price, and the relationship between Collective Intelligence and price.
Kwak et al. [
14] categorized the research papers regarding the price–quality relationship into six types, as shown in
Table 1.
Table 1 shows the classification of price–quality relationship, mainly focusing on the wine industry [
14]. At the first stage, they categorized studies based on the degree of objectivity of the information quality: subjective quality and objective quality. At the second stage, the researchers used the criterion: the subject of the quality evaluation.
Table 1 shows that the websites of Robert Parker, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, Decanter, and Vivino have different positions. Kwak et al. [
14] categorized Robert Parker’s points as subjective with experts/individual quadrant, which is traditionally accepted in the wine industry, especially in the Korean market, because the Parker Point is known as Robert Parker’s individual standard based on his professional and critical intelligence of wine. Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast and Decanter.com, which are considered as CI platforms in this study, are categorized as subjective quality evaluations performed by groups of expert panels. On the other hand, vivino.com is located at the subjective quality with rating performed by public people/individual quadrant [
14,
15].
There are very few studies or research papers that focus on the relationship between Collective Intelligence and price in e-business. Keber and Schuster [
42] suggested a method to find out the power of Collective Intelligence toward price. They applied a method of finding the k-mean of existing statistics for plurality of observations. On the other hand, Kim et al. [
43] conducted research on the price of online games set by Collective Intelligence in the Korean MMORPG game market.
The researchers of this study found that the studies on price and Collective Intelligence are conducted in a specific industry, the game industry, only. Therefore, there is room to expand the scope of research on Collective Intelligence in various industries.
2.5. Wine Evaluation and Price
For a long time, it has been studied that wine professional Robert Parker’s ratings affect market prices. The prices used in these studies are En Primeur price and on-premise wine prices. Practically, retail prices in the wine industry can be accessed from three sources: En Primeur wine price, on-premise wine prices, and off-premise wine prices. En Primeur wine price is the prices set by Bordeaux chateaux owners just 6 or 7 months after the grape harvest, i.e., when the wines are still very young and not yet bottled [
13]. On-premise wine price is the list price of on-premise outlets, such as restaurants, bars, and cafés where wines are served opened. Offline wine price is the price list on retail stores where wines are sold unopened.
Ali et al. [
13] estimated the effect of Parker’s points on En Primeur market prices for 233 Bordeaux wines in 2003. Hay [
12] has reported the impact of Parker’s points on the process of price formation through a comparison of the 2005 and 2008 En Primeur campaigns. Nam and Kwak [
15] and Nam et al. [
16] investigated whether Parker’s points affect the on-premise wine prices in Korea based on the region and vintage of wine production. Thus, the study on any possible relationship between Robert Parker’s points and off-premise wine prices remains undone from academicians’ perspectives.
Studies examining the effect of quality evaluation on price without Robert Parker’s wine evaluation have not been accumulated enough so far. Horowitz and Lockshin [
44] investigate the effect of price on quality evaluation in wine. The paper uses the wine-quality ratings devised by James Halliday in Australia and New Zealand Wine Companion 2000 as the dependent variable in a regression-based analysis. This study covers only New Zealand and Australia geometrically. This study looks at the case where price is used as an indicator of quality. Price is the leading variable and quality is the lagging variable. Oczkowski, E., Doucouliagos, H. [
45] examines the empirical support for the hypothesized hedonic theoretical relation between the price of wine and its quality. This study points out the inconsistency of expert tasters when evaluating wines.
There are also studies that investigated the relationship between price and quality by objective, rather than subjective, evaluation processes. Zeleny’s wine quality study [
46] only examines the wines from the Czech Republic evaluated during the first round of the Prague Wine Trophy 2015 competition. Zeleny [
46] reports many different correlation coefficients between the price and quality according to vintage and type.
Additionally, study on wine quality information-providing websites that are considered as CI platforms is relatively rare. Kwak et al. (2012) studied the effects of Wine Spectator’s ratings and Parker’s points on the on-premise wine market in Korea depending on wine type, vintage, country-of-origin, and region-of-origin [
14]. However, Kwak et al. (2012) did not compare the predictability of scores from two rating sources statistically. Therefore, research on the relationship between Collective Intelligence and price remains a blank in terms of En Primeur wine prices and off-premise wine prices. Additionally, it can be said that the relative comparison of the powers of Parker’s points and the online CI providers toward prices remains blank.
According to the results of literature review, it was found that several variables act as moderators in the relationship between wine quality evaluation and price: evaluation subject, such as CI or individual, country-of-origin, region-of-origin, vintage, and wine type (
Figure 6).
2.7. Research Questions
Previous studies have reported that wine prices correlate with their quality. However, it is different in terms of quality assessment. In other words, wine quality mainly used ratings in competitions [
46], ratings of consumer surveys [
45], and ratings of a specific institute [
44]. Then, what is the impact of CI evaluation?
The researchers of this study aimed to explore whether wine CI platforms, such as the websites of Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast, can have any effect of the wine rating on price as Robert Parker’s ratings does. The researchers set the standard of data sampling for a comparison between CI and individual wine quality evaluation websites.
We select CI information for wine evaluation and price based on country-of-origin (COO), region-of-origin (ROO), vintage, and type of wine color. The researchers of this study developed research questions based on these criteria. The Country-of-Origin Effect (COE), also known as the made-in image and the nationality bias, is a psychological effect describing how consumers’ attitudes, perceptions, and purchasing decisions are influenced by products’ country of origin labeling. Region-of-Origin (ROO) is a psychological effect describing how consumers’ attitudes, perceptions and purchasing decisions are influenced by products’ region of origin labeling [
48].
For example, one can perceive the difference in preference or quality among wines from Bordeaux in France, Bourgogne in France, and Piemonte in Italy. Therefore, according to Region-of-Origin, the wine qualities will be evaluated differently by a reviewer. Furthermore, the same wine label will be evaluated differently by harvest year, that is, vintage. Finally, at the same country, region, and vintage, the wine ratings differ depending on the type of wine: white wine, red wine, and/or sparkling wine. Therefore, Research Questions 1 and 2 were developed based on COO, ROO, vintage, and type of wine.
[Research Question 1]: Are there differences in correlation among the on-premise prices in the Korean market and the wine quality ratings of Robert Parker, Wine Spectator, and Wine Enthusiast regardless of country, region, vintage and type of wine?
Robert Parker is traditionally known for his excellent reputation for French wine evaluation. If you compare the evaluation conducted by CI with Robert Parker’s evaluation of French wine, what would the result be? This was developed as Research Question 2.
[Research Question 2]: Are there differences in the correlation between the on-premise prices of French wines in the Korean market and the wine quality ratings of Robert Parker, Wine Spectator, and Wine Enthusiast?
On the other hand, the type of wine can be a benchmark for comparing the performance of CI and Robert Parker. To check this, the researchers of this study investigated whether there is a difference in the correlation between price and wine quality ratings of CI platforms and of Robert Parker, specifically on the French red wines that have traditionally been evaluated by Robert Parker.
[Research Question 3]: Are there differences in the correlation between the on-premise prices of French red wines the in Korean market and the wine quality ratings of Robert Parker, Wine Spectator, and Wine Enthusiast?