Old fashioned winemaking meets new technology

The Economist has a fascinating article on the use of new farm and food technologies in the wine industry.  The developments are interesting for two reasons. First is that wine making and drinking is, for many people, the embodiment of artisinal and "natural".  Second, many of the technological developments are coming out of France, which might actually help adoption.  

Here are a few interesting segments:

Now, however, the stigma of automation is declining, and more prestigious producers have become open to the use of technology in winemaking. That has prompted inventors to devise new machines to meet their exacting needs. Because consumers remain seduced by the notion that wine should be made by humble farmers with as little intervention as possible, fine-wine labels still try to keep their experiments under wraps. But they are quietly deploying technology in a new way: not just to make bad wine decent, or to make good wine more cheaply, but to make already-great wines greater still.

and

France is the undisputed global leader in wine technology. As Mr Merritt notes, the country has a greater demand for mechanisation than America because its agricultural wages are higher. And France’s reputation means that its elite winemakers, unlike those in other countries, do not have to worry about criticism from elite French winemakers.

The whole thing is interesting: technologies discussed relate to automated picking (and selecting for grapes for optimal quality), new bottle closures (that work better than the old cork), reverse osmosis technologies (that improve flavor and control excess alcohol content), forgery-proof wines, precision irrigation technologies, flavor enhancing chemistry, and many others.   

It will be interesting to see if preferences for better taste and lower cost trump nostalgia.  Regarding one of the new technologies, the article conveyed:

WineSecrets, a firm in California, even lets clients try the same wine at a host of different alcohol levels to see which one tastes best. “Winemakers can’t be honest about what they do, because they’ll be accused of manipulation,” says Clark Smith, an American consultant credited with popularising RO. “When winemakers hear ‘manipulation’, they think, ‘What, you don’t want me to pick the fruit or crush the grapes?’ They’re forced to dissemble or they get demonised.”

When Is Reliance on Voluntary Approaches in Agriculture Likely to Be Effective?

That's the title of a paper by Kathleen Segerson recently published in the Applied Economics Perspectives and Policy.  Although I think she under-estimates the power of factors like reputation and over-estimates the ability of government solutions to efficiently coordinate actions, she offers a useful discussion that we ought to have more often.  The abstract:

Voluntary approaches have been used in a variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes in agriculture, including voluntary conservation programs and product labeling. This paper provides an overview of some of the general principles that emerge from the literature on voluntary approaches and their application in agriculture. The literature suggests that, to be effective, voluntary approaches must provide sufficiently strong participation incentives to a targeted population, clearly identify standards for behavior or performance that ensure additionality and avoid slippage, and monitor outcomes. Thus, reliance on voluntary approaches in agriculture is likely to be effective only if there is sufficient market demand for certain product characteristics, significant public funds are committed to pay for voluntary actions, or the political will exists to impose regulations if voluntary approaches fail.

Assorted Links

For the, no doubt, many readers who have thought you needed a consulting service to teach your nanny how to cook more exotic foods for your children

An interesting theory on the cause of obesity

Meatingplace magazine makes the provocative claim that what is needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions from livestock production is more, not less, confinement

"Anti-science" sentiments are bi-partisan

Forget fantasy football - run your own economics department!

Distinguishing beliefs from preferences in food choice

That's the title of a paper I co-authored with Glynn Tonsor and Ted Schroeder, which is forthcoming in the European Review of Agricultural Economics.  The abstract:

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of studies eliciting consumer willingness-to-pay for food attributes; however, this work has largely refrained from drawing a distinction between preferences for health, safety and quality on the one hand and consumers' subjective beliefs that the products studied possess these attributes, on the other. Using data from three experimental studies, along with structural economic models, we show that controlling for subjective beliefs can substantively alter the interpretation of results and the ultimate implications derived from a study. The results suggest the need to measure subjective beliefs in studies of consumer choice and to utilise the measures when making policy and marketing recommendations.

We show applications related to tenderness, added growth hormones in beef, and country of origin labeling.  Here are a couple excerpts:

The reason why the conventional ‘reduced form’ model yields a potentially misleading result is that it does not take into account the fact that most people believe that the generic steak is safe. The reason the premium for natural over generic was so low in the ‘reduced form’ model was not because people did not care about safety but rather because they, on average, believed the health risks from growth hormones and antibiotics in the generic steak were low.

and

the results reveal that, at the mean beliefs, consumers are WTP a premium of only about USD 1.68 . . . for a US origin steak relative to the ‘weighted average origin’ steak. The reason why the value is so low is that most people believe the unlabelled steak is highly likely to come from US origin.

The estimates allow us to make interesting calculations like:

of the total WTP premium for guaranteed tender steak, 46 per cent is due to perceived value of added tenderness; the remaining 54 per cent is due to other factors. A similar computation reveals that of the total WTP premium for natural steak over the generic steak, only 38 per cent is due to perceived added healthiness or no hormone use; the remaining 62 per cent is due to other factors.

and

The implication is that when a product has a mixed-origin label, people are
apparently pessimistic, believing the joint-labelled product to have a much
higher likelihood of coming from the less-preferred origin.

For the Starving, 'Eat Local' Isn't an Option

That is the title of an opinion piece at the WSJ in which Adrienne Johnson warns that the local food movement isn't all it's promoted to be.  A few snippets:

More important, local foods do nothing to help the world's poor, who have long relied on export markets for their livelihood. American farmers likewise rely on foreign markets: About 25% of total crop production is exported, according to the Agriculture Department, representing a near $100 billion market that helps offset trade deficits in other sectors.

The "return" to local foods and yeoman farmsteads isn't just impossible. It misdirects political attention away from the problem of world hunger. Local foods simply cannot feed the world.

and

In this global sense, the often-heard eat-local slogan of "vote with a fork" is well-intentioned but naïve. It doesn't satisfy our moral obligations as global citizens. If you want to cast a food-related vote, find a candidate talking about global hunger and do it at the ballot box.

We shouldn't deny ourselves the privilege (if we have it) of a good meal, but let's not do so under the banner of political action. If you're eating free-range chicken from an organic farm down the road, with side orders of locally sourced arugula and kale, just remember you're not acting politically. You're just having dinner.

I'm glad to see these ideas in the WSJ.  They are many of the the same arguments I've made with Bailey Norwood at the Library of Economics and Liberty and in Chapter 9 of the Food Police.  If you want a whole book on the subject see The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet.