Why does wine brand popularity not follow a power law distribution? | Hacker News Reader

Why does wine brand popularity not follow a power law distribution?

gamedevblog.com

5 pointskurige6 comments

Short blog article posing that exact question. The article is otherwise devoid of facts or hypothesis, but I'm very much interested in hearing HN's thoughts, since it's a very interesting question.

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Because running a winery that produces distinctive wines and having that winery crank out hundreds of millions of cases a year isn't that feasible. It's not like Coke where you can just produce more of the same product with the same process without affecting the character of.

Wine popularity absolutely does follow a power law distribution. The leading brands are ones like Yellowtail, Woodbridge, Beringer, Cavit, and Sutter Home.

The quick answer is "no, it doesn't, nothing does":

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html

The better answer emerges if you think about the example a little more closely. The big power law brands driven by customer appreciation are in media -- people love Lady Gaga (say), so she sells gazillions. Nobody loves yellowtail or sutter home. Many people love Screaming Eagle or Chateau Lafite. However, wine is an agricultural product; you cannot produce more bottles of a great wine than you can grow in some very particular fields in a year. The way scary hit-driven industries work is that you sell things way above marginal cost to everyone who wants them; in wine, since there's actually scarcity, very few people who love a brand can get as much as they want of it, so the prices at the top are insane (recent vintage screaming eagle is indicated at $2-3k per bottle), but the brands are smaller.

I'd guess the way to think of it is like the music industry before recording devices or electricity -- sure there are stars, but because supplies are limited nobody can by a megastar.

I don't think you read the original blog post...

But good for you, since it was crap and my only goal in that comment was to point that out quickly and politely.

At the peril of being annoying long after the fact, I did read the post, and he does have a point that's a little deeper than your rejoinder: wine does not have the competition-destroying superstar effect we see in categories with less constrained supply. Your examples are not comparable to the kind of market position the players mentioned in the original post have. The favorite brands do not drive out the smaller players. Is that a "power law" or not, well, hard to say; if it's purely size-based, sure, but if we're talking about the way that a big brand dominates a market, no, there is no such thing in wine.

wine is probably more like cereal. In any case there were about 300 million cases sold in the US in 2008

Here are rankings of the top wine producers by case in 2008

http://www.winebusiness.com/wbm/?go=getArticle&dataId=54...

E&J gallo - 68 million constellation - 59M The wine group 44M

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