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To: TobagoJack who wrote (65129)	7/24/2006 8:11:45 PM
From: shades	Respond to of 110194

Aged Wine video.msn.com Well Walmart bringing fine wine to the masses - this was one of my major inflation hedges General. winereview.wordpress.com nytimes.com In a paper called “Stardust Over Paris,” two economists, Olivier Gergaud from the University of Reims and Vincenzo Verardi at the Free University of Brussels, and a mathematician, Linett Montaño Guzmán, looked at how much a Michelin star — a special designation of dining quality — is worth. Receiving a Michelin star increases prices in a Parisian restaurant by 20 percent, controlling for measures of quality, décor and location. Michelin-starred restaurants in fancy hotels, or in areas with other Michelin-starred restaurants, also have higher prices, again adjusting for quality. Diners are paying more to eat in fine or prestigious surroundings, whether or not the food is better. One gastronomy expert, speaking in Le Nouvel Observateur, noted, “Gaining a Michelin star ensures that your banker will be kind to you.” For those who hold the food as their main concern, the researchers offer a way forward. Dr. Verardi and Dr. Gergaud have built an index for overpriced and underpriced restaurants, relative to their food. They use the Zagat Survey to Parisian restaurants — whose popularity rankings are generated by diners’ reports, not critics — to provide an independent measure of customer satisfaction, which is then compared with price. In their sample, Bistro d’Albert is the most underrated restaurant; it produces a level of customer satisfaction that is undervalued by 55 percent relative to its price, according to their calculations. The well-known Maxim’s appears on the overpriced side of the ledger. Wine markets exhibit analogous disparities between price and pleasure. Prices follow published rankings and label information more than the results of subjective taste tests. That was the finding in a recent study (“What Determines Wine Prices?”) of Bordeaux and Burgundy vintages by Sébastian Lecocq and Michael Visser, both researchers at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique. The paper was published in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Wine Economics, edited by Karl Storchmann of Whitman College, and allied with the Quantitative Gastronomy group. Interestingly, the prices of California rather than French wines are more likely to be correlated with subjective taste tests. The packaging of food and wine with status is not restricted to France. Manhattan now has the $350 meal at the sushi restaurant Masa. But American dining has been less subject to rigidly stratified layers of prestige. The Michelin dining guide has come to New York City, but it does not have the same cachet as in France, where it sells 400,000 copies a year.