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This dynamic has brought a number of questions to mind. Does boxed wine have a noticeably
different quality than that of bottled wine? For the great difference in price that a sophisticated
wine drinker could pay for the equivalent volume of wine, is it really, in general, worth the
“investment” in a relatively expensive bottle versus a boxed wine that costs, say, a fifth of the
price by volume? Is it worth the expenditure even for an inexpensive bottle of wine versus a still
less expensive box? Are there inherent quality differences between boxed wines which sell at a
higher price tag and those that are the lowest price of all? It all boils down to this: where does
the best value lie when determining whether to buy boxed or bottled wine? Or are there good
and bad wines at all price points? Can people tell the difference between boxed and bottled
wine, or is it just the method of packaging that makes it a “less sophisticated” wine?
The subsequent screening experiment was devised to make some initial but definitive
conclusions on these matters.
Allowed-to-vary factors
The wines may come from separate distributors, which allows for different storage
procedures. This is assumed to have negligible impact on the outcome of this
experiment.
Nuisance factors
Year – year can have a great effect on wine quality, but it is assumed that using year as a
design factor will make the samples (boxes/bottles) rather hard acquire for this
experiment.
Winery – though all wines will come from California, they will be grown by different
wineries. Again, this could affect wine quality, but we are looking at price as a factor,
and price is assumed to be an indicator of quality. It may be a hypothesis for further
experimentation that one should not be worried about price, but rather by the wine’s
maker (or instead by the year and region it was grown).
Time – because the experiment will be a taste test, a taster’s opinion of wine may change
(positively or negatively) as the test goes on. Time correlates with the amount of alcohol
the taster has consumed, so it will not be considered a separate factor.
Tasters – ratings from individual tasters is potentially an extremely large source of
variation. Obviously, each taster much be treated as an individual block, and a replicate
of all factor combinations must be evaluated by each taster to account for this variability.
To visualize the design, I have assigned low and high levels to each factor below.
Package: (-) Box, (+) Bottle
Price: (-) Low, (+) High
Type: (-) Cabernet Sauvignon, (-) Merlot
Now a Latin Square table can be created to ensure randomization. Table 4-1 is the random Latin
Square chosen for the experiment. Blocking is performed for drink order and each taster to
minimize these nuisance factors.
Drink Taster
Order 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 7 5 3 4 2 0 1 6
2 5 4 1 6 0 2 7 3
3 3 7 6 0 5 1 2 4
4 1 3 2 5 4 6 0 7
5 6 1 0 7 3 4 5 2
6 0 2 7 1 6 3 4 5
7 2 0 4 3 7 5 6 1
8 4 6 5 2 1 7 3 0
Table 4-1: 8x8 Latin Square design showing treatment combinations for each taster and
drink order
Finally, notice that the binary treatment combinations are ordered. That is, the first 4 numbers
are the boxes, and the last 2 numbers are the highest priced bottles. In an attempt to eliminate
the possibility of a taster’s conscious or unconscious association of a numbered wine with a
certain rating (e.g. wine #7 must be the highest rated wine), I randomly assigned a planet’s name
to each of the combinations. These codes were only used for the purposes of the rating sheet that
each taster received, and were used to eliminate bias during the blind taste test. This coding is
shown in Table 4-2 on the following page. I have also included a column that gives the actual
wines chosen for each treatment combination.
Table 4-2: Planet code structure and wines chosen for each treatment combination
Each round of one ounce samples was served simultaneously, and the sampling glasses were
cleared of residue by rinsing with water between samples. Wine crackers were used between
rounds to cleanse the palate, and each taster had a glass of drinking water. The wines were
served from pitchers marked only with the planet’s name they were coded with. Because of the
nature of the Latin Square, each round consisted of one sample of each factor combination. This
proved to be tedious, but was necessary to collect the best set of data possible.
Wine Taster
Type 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
0 13 8 12 21 7 14 12 15
1 14 11 12 11 12 9 14 11
2 9 16 13 13 22 16 18 17
3 17 13 19 15 12 14 13 15
4 7 9 15 9 8 8 16 6
5 8 27 15 18 10 14 9 18
6 23 27 20 15 20 11 22 27
7 10 26 21 18 18 16 25 6
Table 6-1: Wine rating for each taster and treatment combination
On first glance, there appears to be a wide variance in taste for some wines. JMP analysis shows,
however, that a meaningful conclusion can still be made.
I have included all of the two-factor and three-factor interactions as well as the two blocking
factors in the model that will be fit to the data. This was set up using the Custom Design option
in JMP, and can be seen in Figure 6-1.
Figure 6-1: JMP effects modeled
The JMP output is as follows. With an R2 of just 0.53, the actual by predicted plot and the
Summary of Fit (Figure 6-2 and Table 6-2) attest to the large variance in data.
The ANOVA and model parameter estimates, given in Tables 6-3 through 6-5, conclude that
there is high significance in only one parameter: price. Package type was only significant at the
8% level, and the type of wine had no significance. None of the interaction terms were
significant, although the price-type and package-price-type interactions were significant at 8%
and 6% levels respectively. Interestingly, the block effects for Tasters and Drink Order (time)
were insignificant. The effect of the first drink, however, was nearly significant at the 5% level
suggesting that blocking was still worthwhile.
The two-factor interaction plots are shown in Figure 6-3 below. Again, the price-type interaction
shows low significance, but there is some cross-over there.
Although there was no significant interaction among the factors, the interaction profiles actually
provide a little more insight into the results. Figure 7-1 below is a copy of Figure 6-3. The left-
center plot shows that the low priced boxed and bottled wines had practically equal ratings and
the high priced bottled wine had greater ratings than the high priced boxed wine. This could lead
to further experimentation and optimization to understand precisely where the value lies since
the high priced bottle still cost more by volume than the high priced box.
The main takeaway from this experiment, unfortunately, is that a good wine does in general
come with a higher price tag. But do not give up hope because there is always a chance for a
“diamond in the rough” since this experiment was run with a very limited subset of the available
wines on the market. Obviously, there are bargain wines out there; and there is not a linear
relationship between the price you pay for wine and its total quality. This leads to the final idea
for experimentation brought about by my analysis: For a given price point, how great is the
range in quality? This experiment would be run with wine as a random factor so that wines
could be randomly sampled rather than requiring a test involving the entire population of wines.
Wine Scoring Sheet 1
What is the average price (retail) of a bottle of wine that you drink? $_____