In the excellent Freakonomics Blog on the New York Times Website, every now and then there’s something cool and relevant for us in the wine world, as we’ve discussed here before.

I’ve been slowly working on a post where I’ll discuss the wine judging I’ve done in the last couple weeks, both for Cornucopia and for The Vancouver Magazine International Wine Awards (link goes to last year’s).  In researching articles and write-ups on the world of judging, I found an interesting Freakonomics post from mid-October.

Why We Love To Hate Awards opens with these words:

Obama expressed his disappointment recently when rapper Kanye West stormed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to protest singer Taylor Swift’s win of the “Best Female Video” trophy. Soon after, Obama himself was Swifted by critics who felt he was undeserving of his Nobel Prize win. This process is “not wildly out of character with how awards generally work,” writes Jonathan Chait at The New Republic. He references a study published in the Journal of Wine Economics which found that “a wine that wins one competition is no more likely to win another competition than any other wine…”

You can read the rest of the short post here, The New Republic article it points toward here, and the Journal of Wine Economics study that started the whole thing right over here…

Cool stuff.

Nerdy stuff, but cool stuff nonetheless.