James Bond, alcoholic

Merry Christmas to everyone. As usual for this blog at this time of year, for your Christmas reading we will take a look at a particular aspect of human consumption, in this case alcohol.

James Bond was created in 1953 by Ian Fleming (who also created Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, The Magical Car), and over a 14-year period there was a series of 12 novels and two short-story collections. The rights to the character were purchased for the film world in the 1960s, so that over the past 50 years we have had a franchise of 24 official films, plus two other licensed ones (Casino Royale in 1967, and Never Say Never Again in 1983).

Actually, the first licensed Bond film was a long-forgotten one made for CBS TV in 1954. This was a 1-hour version of Casino Royale, starring Barry Nelson as Bond, Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre, and Linda Christian as a renamed Vesper Lynd (see Barry Nelson - den bortglömde Bond).

This movie infographic (excluding the 2015 film, and the unofficial films) is from The Economist.

The Bond character

James Bond has been portrayed in films officially by six different actors, but the character remains essentially the same, although somewhat different from the one depicted in the books.

In early 1997, the monthly magazine Men's Health published an article in which doctors and psychologists commented on the life and lifestyle of the Bond character, the world's most un-secret secret agent (see Sprit, kvinnor och cigarretter tog livet av James Bond). The results were not good — Bond was either dead or close to it, as he was a paranoid, impotent alcoholic.

Bond's psychological profile was that of an emotionally stunted psychopath of type A who suffers from post-traumatic stress. According to Fleming's books, Bond was orphaned at age 11 (his parents died in a mountaineering accident), he lost his virginity in a brothel in Paris at 16, and killed his first mistress the following year. An ideal man to be a licensed assassin.

His massive daily alcohol consumption (all carefully documented in both the books and films) makes him a category 3 alcoholic. This means that he couldn't possibly have done his actual job competently; and it should also have led to violent temper outbursts (which may explain the government-sanctioned killing sprees). The liquor should also have led to a shrinking of his genitals, and have damaged his liver to the extent that it could no longer break down estrogen, so that he started to develop breasts and become impotent. His well-documented sexual excesses would also make him a prime candidate for sexually transmitted diseases. On top of this, the books (but not the films) also document a comprehensive smoking habit.

Bond was, of course, a form of wish-fulfillment for his creator, Ian Fleming, who was also a heavy drinker and smoker. He died of a heart attack at age 56, an age that Bond himself could not possibly have out-lived. Bond was more in danger from his own lifestyle than from SMERSH, or anyone else bent on world domination.

Bond is thus more a collection of memes than an actual character. This infographic is from the GBShowPlates website, and summarizes Bond's lifestyle.

The Bond drinks

Just about every aspect of Bond's career has been analyzed, and ranked, from the music to the cars to the watches, and most especially the women (the so-called "Bond girls"). However, much of the interest seems to lie in the booze, which is what we will look at here.

Along with coffee (and, once, tea), Bond has consumed copious amounts of alcohol, which he tends to drink alone, or in private settings. He is also what is known as a "label drinker", in that the brand is at least as important as the bottle's contents. This is a gift for the liquor industry, who, along with the car industry, are perpetually looking for opportunities for "brand placement" in films and sporting events. Fleming was chastised for introducing this into his books, but he simply replied that it was an attempt to round-out the character.

As far as the novels are concerned, they have received special medical attention by Graham Johnson, Indra Neil Guha, Patrick Davies (2013. Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor? British Medical Journal 347: f7255). They recorded every drink consumed in every book, calculated the number of alcohol units involved, and then converted that to daily intake (since the books are quite clear about their time span).

Their results are summarized in this infographic, from their article.

Basically, the medical results were as before:

Across 12 of the 14 books, 123.5 days were described, though Bond was unable to consume alcohol for 36 days because of external pressures (admission to hospital, incarceration, rehabilitation). During this time he was documented as consuming 1150.15 units of alcohol. Taking into account days when he was unable to drink, his average alcohol consumption was 92 units a week (1150 units over 87.5 days). Inclusion of the days incarcerated brings his consumption down to 65.2 units a week. His maximum daily consumption was 49.8 units (From Russia with Love day 3). He had 12.5 alcohol free days out of the 87.5 days on which he was able to drink.

Furthermore, when we plotted Bond's alcohol consumption over time, his intake dropped in the middle of his career but gradually increased towards the end. This consistent but variable lifetime drinking pattern has been reported in patients with alcoholic liver disease.

UK NHS [National Health Service] recommendations for alcohol consumption state that an adult male should drink no more than 21 units a week, with no more than 4 units on any one day, and at least two alcohol free days a week. James Bond's drinking habits are well in excess of each of these three parameters. This level of consumption makes him a category 3 drinker (>60 g alcohol / day) and therefore in the highest risk group for malignancies, depression, hypertension, and cirrhosis. He is also at high risk of suffering from sexual dysfunction, which would considerably affect his womanising.

Analyzing the films is more difficult. A number of people have tackled this task, including Nerdist, The Grocer, and Atomic Martinis (now defunct, but repeated on the website of the world's only James Bond Museum, in Sweden), and David Leigh. The basic problem seems to be whether the alcohol is "spotted either in hand, glass or in the background". Also, "The major problem is 007’s frequent enjoyment of multiple bottles of champagne, or portions of bottles of liquor ... it is often impossible to determine exactly how many separate drinks came from a given bottle."

The following infographic (not including the 2015 movie or the unofficial films) is derived from one produced at Buddy Loans. However, some of the people at Reddit were not happy with the original, so it was redesigned, as shown here.

The people at Nerdist took the data from this film infographic, converted it from units of alcohol to grams of alcohol, and then used this to estimate Bond’s total alcohol content. This yields a Blood Alcohol Content of 3.7%. "While some humans have survived a BAC of past 1%, it generally holds that anything past 0.5% will either kill you or leave you seriously poisoned. Therefore ... Bond’s tipsy tally is enough to put a man past a safe limit seven times over."

At The Grocer, they have also pointed out the relative booziness of the various Bond incarnations, by calculating the average intake per film by each actor, in units of alcohol:

Sean Connery George Lazenby Roger Moore Timothy Dalton Pierce Brosnan Daniel Craig

11   9 11   4.5 12 20

Finally, we need a phylogenetic network, of course. I collated the presence/absence of each drink type for each book and movie (excluding the 2015 film) from the book by David Leigh (2012. The Complete Guide to the Drinks of James Bond, 2nd edition. Kindle), and then updated this where it clearly disagrees with other sources. (For example, no mention is made of sherry, and yet it is involved in one of the most popular Bond scenes from the film version of Diamonds are Forever.) I then analyzed the data using a NeighborNet. (James Bond Memes has tried an ordination analysis of the same data source.)

The books are shown in red, and the early films starring Connery and Lazenby are shown in blue (including Connery's later Never Say Never Again). These books and films are almost all at the top and right of the network, indicating that they have a distinct collection of drink types compared to the later films. I suspect that this reflects increasing use of "product placements" in the films. The only book plus movie combination that has similar drinks is You Only Live Twice. Interestingly, the Skyfall movie (from 2012) seems to return to the drinks genre of the earlier works, even though the alcohol consumption is much higher. The most unusual works were the Goldfinger and On Her Majesty's Secret Service books, where a number of drink styles were consumed that appeared nowhere else in the canon.

As noted by Johnson et al. (quoted above):

Despite his alcohol consumption, [Bond] is still described as being able to carry out highly complicated tasks and function at an extraordinarily high level. This is likely to be pure fiction.

Grape harvest dates as proxies for global warming

Phenological patterns are often highly correlated with temperatures. As noted by Chuine et al. (2004):

Biological and documentary proxy records have been widely used to reconstruct temperature variations to assess the exceptional character of recent climate fluctuations. Grape-harvest dates, which are tightly related to temperature, have been recorded locally for centuries in many European countries. These dates may therefore provide one of the longest uninterrupted series of regional temperature anomalies (highs and lows).

Harvest dates of grapes in western Europe (used for wine-making) are of especial interest because they constitute long phenological records, as a result of the fact that the harvest dates are usually officially decreed, based on the ripeness of the grapes. In other words, we have historical records for many locations over many years.

Daux et al. (2012) have compiled many of these records into a publicly accessible database archived at the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology.

This database comprises time series for 380 locations, mainly from France (93% of the data) as well as from Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Luxembourg. The series have variable lengths up to 479 years, with the oldest harvest date being for 1354 CE in Burgundy. The series are grouped into 27 regions "according to their location, to geomorphological and geological criteria, and to past and present grape varieties." These regions are shown in the map.

Normally, such data would simply be graphed as a time series for each region. However, as usual in this blog, we can examine these data using a phylogenetic network, to perform an exploratory data analysis. However, most of the data are actually "missing", because most of the time series have time gaps or cover only short periods. So, to create a more complete dataset I have extracted the data for the years 1800-1880, inclusive, because for this period 17 of the regions have mostly a complete series.

Two of the time series are shown in the first graph. This shows that the two time series are highly correlated, as are most of them. In this case, the correlation coefficient is 0.87.

I then used the gower distance to calculate the similarity of the different years and regions, based on the harvest dates (the gower measure is needed in order to deal with the fact that some of the data are still missing). This was followed by a neighbor-net analysis to display the between-region and the between-year similarities as two phylogenetic networks.

Only the first network is shown here. Regions that are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on the variation in their harvest dates through time, and those that are further apart are progressively more different from each other.

Many of the patterns here are to be expected, based on the geographical proximities of the regions, but some are not. For example, Ile de France, Champagne and Vendée - Poitou Charente are all in northern France (see the map) while Bordeaux is in the south-west, and the Rhone Valley regions are in the south-east. As Le Roy Ladurie & Baulant (1980) have noted, the vineyards of northern and central France are in a different climatic zone from the wine regions of southern France (to the south of the Geneva parallel) and those of western France (west of the Chateau-du-Loire meridian).

Similarly, at the other end of the network, the Lower Loire region is not geographically located near any of the associated regions in the network. Possibly the most unexpected pattern, then, is the network separation of the Upper and Lower regions of the Loire Valley, which are the two regions whose time series are graphed above.

Clearly, the network is displaying only quite small differences between the time series. That is, the time patterns are very consistent across the regions, which does indeed make them useful for studying past temperature patterns.

References

Isabel Chuine, Pascal Yiou, Nicolas Viovy, Bernard Seguin, Valérie Daux, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (2004) Grape ripening as a past climate indicator. Nature 432: 289-290.

V. Daux, I. Garcia de Cortazar-Atauri, P. Yiou, I. Chuine, E. Garnier, E. Le Roy Ladurie, O. Mestre, J. Tardaguila (2012) An open-database of grape harvest dates for climate research: data description and quality assessment. Climate of the Past 8: 1403-1418.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Micheline Baulant (1980) Grape harvests from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10: 839-849.

A century of French wine vintages

It has been quite some time since I have produced a network-based exploratory data analysis (EDA) of some multivariate dataset, so it could be time to do so again.

In the wine industry, it is common to provide quality scores for the different vintages from particular wine-producing regions. These so-called vintage charts are intended to tell us how the harvest quality has varied from vintage to vintage. They are often disparaged, because they simplify the complexities of each harvest (where there can be considerable spatial variation) down into a single number. They also make little sense if a single number is applied to a very large area, which often occurs in practice.

Nevertheless, they can be an interesting and informative guide to the general features of each vintage, especially if they cover a long period of time.

My interest in this concept comes from the fact that I have recently started a blog about wine: The Wine Gourd. In the interests of doing something different to every other wine blogger, this blog delves into the world of wine data, instead of the usual reviews of recently released wines. The intention is to ferret out some of the interesting stuff, and to bring it out into the light, for everyone to see. Hopefully, this will be both interesting and informative.

French wine vintages

The Cavus Vinifera web site has produced vintage charts for several of the wine-producing regions of France, from the year 1900 to the present. This is very unusual, as most vintage charts cover a much shorter period of time. This circumstance thus provides the opportunity to compare these French regions over the past century, to investigate to what extent vintage variation is correlated among these areas.

Each vintage from 1900-2014 has been rated on a scale of 0-20. The region and wines covered by the entire time span include:
   Région de Bordeaux (rouge)
   Région de Bordeaux (blanc)
   Région de Bordeaux (liquoreux)
   Région de la Bourgogne (rouge)
   Région de la Bourgogne (blanc)
   Région du Rhône (Nord)
   Région du Rhône (Sud)
   Région du Loire (rouge)
   Région de la Champagne
   Région du Beaujolais

As usual, we can use a phylogenetic network to visualize these data, with the network being used as a form of exploratory data analysis. I first used the manhattan distance to calculate the similarity of the different years and regions, based on the quality scores. This was followed by a neighbor-net analysis to display the between-region and the between-year similarities as two phylogenetic networks.

The network for the ten regions is shown in the first graph. Regions that are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on the variation in their vintage quality scores through time, and those that are further apart are progressively more different from each other.

Not unexpectedly, the different wines from the same regions form neighborhoods: the three wines types from Bordeaux (in south-western France); the three wines from Burgundy and Beaujolais (along the Saône River in eastern France); and the two wines from the Rhône River (in the south-east). However, unexpectedly, the Loire wine, from western France, is associated with the Rhône wines, while the Champagne region, in northern France, is somewhat isolated.

The network for the 115 years is shown in the second graph. In this case, years that are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on the vintage quality scores averaged across all of the regions, and those that are further apart are progressively more different from each other.

Here, the years form a gradient from the poorest-quality years, at the top, to the best-quality vintages at the bottom. Only four of the vintages are labeled, but the vintages at the top of the network include 1902, 1910, 1913, 1930, 1931, and 1968. The vintages at the bottom of the graph include: 1929, 1945 and 1947, followed by 1928, 1949, 1989 and 1990, and then 1906, 1953, 1959, 1961 and 2005.

Note that the 1930s were generally not a good time for wine-making in France, and nor were the 1910s (although 1906 was an early century exception). The 1940s and 1950s, on the other hand, were generally good times for wine production.

The 1910 vintage stands out as particularly poor, with none of the regions scoring more than 10 out of 20 for their grape harvest, and both Burgundy wines scoring 0. This contrasts with the best years, where no region scored less than 16 out of 20.

Needless to say, the years stacked in the middle of the graph were variable, with some regions having a good time in a particular year and some having a bad time in that same year. This is the normal state of affairs.

A network analysis of Médoc wines

In recent weeks I have analyzed the behavior of well-known wine commentators when evaluating the red wines of Bordeaux for two specific vintages (2004 and 2005). I will finish this series by expanding the analysis to include many vintages and also the "official" classification of the Bordeaux wineries (called "châteaux" even if they do not have an actual château).

The initial data that I have analyzed were taken from:
Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh (1996) Pricing red wines of Médoc vintages from 1949 to 1989 at Christie's auctions. Journal de la Société Statistique de Paris 137: 19-49.
I have then supplemented these data as best I could, to fill in missing values.

The first dataset consists of overall quality ratings of each of the 41 Médoc ("left bank") vintages from 1949-1989 from four sources:

• Tastet & Lawton, the oldest wine broker of the Quai des Chartrons in Bordeaux, as originally compiled by Franck Dubourdieu (1992) Les Grands Bordeaux de 1945-1988. Bordeaux: Mollat
• Robert M. Parker (1990) Les Vins de Bordeaux. Paris: Solar; supplemented with data from his online chart
• James Suckling and Thomas Matthews (1994) The Bordeaux 50 up close. Wine Spectator, October 15; supplemented with data from an online chart
• The price index constructed by Di Vittorio and Ginsburgh based on a regression analysis of Christie's auction sales, which takes into account wine age, no. bottles, bottle size, year of sale, case opened/unopened.

The scores have been converted to a 0-20 scale; and there are considerable missing data, especially before 1970. The manhattan distance measure was calculated between each pair of evaluators, and the result displayed as a Split Decomposition network. People who are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on their rating patterns, and those who are further apart are progressively more different from each other.

Click to enlarge.

Note, first, that the split uniting the critic Robert Parker with the auction prices is slightly better supported than the one for the critic James Suckling. The local Bordeaux brokers (Tastet & Lawton) do not have a split shown that unites them with the prices. This supports the common observation that it is usually the internationally known wine critics' evaluations of the vintages that strongly influences the auction prices — a well-regarded vintage will sell for a higher amount.

Second, the terminal edges are quite long relative to the internal ones, indicating that a lot of the variation of the vintage evaluations is unique to each evaluation source. They certainly do not agree very much with each other about which vintages are better than others. In particular, note that the auction price has a very long terminal edge, indicating that much of the variation in the prices is actually independent of the opinion of the professional wine evaluators about the quality of the vintage.

Moving on, let us now consider the wines themselves.

In 1855 the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce requested the Bordeaux Brokers' Association to rank and classify 60 Haut-Médoc châteaux according to quality, ranking them in five categories: First to Fifth Growth. This was done for use at the Exposition Universelle de Paris, the world's fair of the day. This ranking is said to have been based on the long-term wine prices achieved by the various vineyards, plus some local politicking (the prestige of the wine and the owner, etc).

It is preposterous to imagine that this ancient ranking could still apply unchanged today, and yet it continues to play a large part in contemporary wine lore and seems to be a big determinant of wine prices (eg. the five "first growths" sell for 3-6 times the price of the best-regarded "second growths", even though it is widely acknowledged by wine critics that today they are not much better in quality).

Naturally, some people have not taken this situation lying down, and they have done something about developing a ranking and classification that has a bit more contemporary relevance:

• Alexis Lichine (1979) Guide to the Wines and Vineyards of France. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
• Patrick Dussert-Gerber (1988) Guide des Vins de France 1989. Paris: Albin Michel.
• Robert M. Parker (1990) Les Vins de Bordeaux. Paris: Solar.
• The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 Index, which tracks the prices of 100 top wines (95% of which are from Bordeaux). Data were released in 2009, based on price averages calculated from 2003-2007, and again in 2011, based on prices from 2005-2009. I have taken the average of these two data sources (and called it the 2010 price).

For the first data analysis I have restricted myself to the 5-class classification rather than the rankings, so that the scale for each château is 1-5 for each of the five classification sources, with a small amount of missing data. The manhattan distance measure was calculated between each pair of classifications, and the result displayed as a Split Decomposition network.

Click to enlarge.

Note, first, that the creation of the Liv-ex 2010 wine price was an exercise designed to emulate the procedure used to create the original 1855 classification. It is thus interesting to note that the best-supported split separates these two classifications! As anticipated, modern perception of the quality of the châteaux does not closely match that 150 years ago; and it is time that wine writers stopped mentioning 1855 as their first comment when introducing Bordeaux wine.

The best-supported split actually unites the Parker classification with the current prices, which is not unexpected given the influence that Parker is recognized to have on Bordeaux wine prices, particularly in the USA. It is for this reason that Parker-recommended wines will never be good value for money.

The long terminal edges for most of the classifications emphasize their unique nature. Indeed, the lack of uniformity between the classifications makes wine classification look distinctly more like an art than a science.

Finally, it is interesting to note that Lichine's classification appears to be a compromise between the current price and the 1855 classification — this is supported by the second-biggest split, and Lichine has the shortest terminal edge. This was, of course, Lichine's stated objective: a marriage of the old and the new.

This leads us to the châteaux rankings rather than their classification. The following graph plots the 1855 ranking of 50 château (out of the original 60) against their ranking based on the 2010 Liv-ex Fine Wine price ranking.

Only the top three châteaux are still in their same ranked position, although 34 (two-thirds) of them are within a rank of 11 of where they were in 1855. However, the calculated r-square value reveals that only 32% of the variation in current ranking is associated with the 1885 ranking. Metaphorically, the glass is either one-third full or two-thirds empty, depending on which way you view your wine glass.

For those of you who are interested, the top five wines are (in order):
Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Latour, Château Margaux, Château Mouton Rothschild, and Château Haut-Brion (with Mouton and Haut-Brion having swapped places since 1855). The stand-out second growths are: Château Palmer (up from rank 28) and Château Léoville-Las Cases (up from 9).

Network analysis of Bordeaux wine critics II

Last week I provided a brief network analysis of the evaluation behaviour of a few well-known wine commentators, by comparing the scores that they gave to some red Médoc wines from the 2004 vintage. Today I will expand this analysis by doing a similar comparison for the 2005 vintage wines.

The point of doing this is that the critics regularly claim that a particular year has produced "the vintage of the century", which they did for Bordeaux in 2000, 2005 and 2009. Leaving aside the obvious hyperbole, the 2005 vintage was a apparently a very different affair (Wine Spectator magazine gave it a score of 98/100) from the 2004 vintage (Wine Spectator score = 89). (Note that these scores can vary only from 50-100, not 0-100, so the scores are actually 96% versus 78%, respectively.) This means that we can compare a very good vintage with an ordinary one, to see if it makes any difference to the way the evaluators behave.

As last time, the data to be analyzed are taken from the bordOverview (Bolomey Wijnimport) website: http://www.bordoverview.com/?year=2005. They consist of quality ratings of 141 wines by 6 expert commentator groups (associated with wine magazines or newsletters), these scores being awarded in October 2008:
United States of America
  Wine Advocate (Robert Parker)
  Wine Spectator (James Suckling)
United Kingdom
  Jancis Robinson
  Decanter (Steven Spurrier, James Lawther, Michel Bettane)
France
  Tast (Michel Bettane, Thierry Desseauve)
  La Revue du Vin de France (Bernard Burtschy)

The scores have been converted to a 0-100 scale, and all wines were evaluated by all commentators. The manhattan distance measure was calculated between each pair of commentators, and the result displayed as a NeighborNet network. People who are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on their scoring patterns, and those who are further apart are progressively more different from each other.

Click to enlarge.

Note, first, that there is considerable conflict among the critics. As noted last time, they certainly don't agree with each other uniformly, presumably because wine tasting is an art not a science.

Second, the relationship between the commentators is quite different compared to last time. Importantly, this time there is no suggestion of a cultural divide between the French- and English-speaking commentators. Perhaps cultural preferences play a larger role only when the wine is of average quality (2004) whereas high-quality wine (2005) has more international appreciation.

Finally, there are more long terminal edges than last time, indicating that more of each opinion is unique to that particular commentator. This suggests that personal preferences play a larger role when evaluating good wine (2005) compared to average wine (2004). Apparently it is not true that "good wine is good wine and everyone can agree on it".

Once again, we can also produce a directed graph rather than an undirected one, by nominating Robert Parker as the outgroup to the others, and producing a rooted reticulation network. In this diagram the blue lines indicate "hybridization" histories.

Click to enlarge.

In this analysis, the Decanter (Spurrier et alia) and Wine Spectator (Suckling) opinions are hybrid ones, as they also were last time. (The Revue du Vin de France opinion is not a hybrid this time.) However, only one of the hybrid sources is the same as last time (Parker's as a source of Suckling's). Interestingly, the Decanter opinion, from the UK, is simply a mixture of the two French opinions. The presence of Michel Bettane on two of the tasting panels may have something to do with this. Also, the Wine Spectator is a hybrid of UK and US opinions.

As before, everyone's opinion seems to be someone else's, modified in response to someone else again; and this is not related to whether the wine is "good" or "average" since it happened for both 2004 and 2005.

Network analysis of Bordeaux wine critics

Last week I provided a brief network analysis of the characteristics of single-malt Scotch whiskies. Today I wish to consider fermented rather than distilled products, and to move on to an analysis of the commentators rather than the actual products. I will do this by looking at the red wines from the Médoc region (the so-called "Left Bank" of Bordeaux, France) from the 2004 vintage. There are people who think that these are the best wines in the world, but as an Australian I find this attitude naïve.

The data to be analyzed are taken from the bordOverview (Bolomey Wijnimport) website: http://www.bordoverview.com/?year=2004. They consist of quality ratings of 27 wines by 7 expert commentator groups (associated with wine magazines or newsletters), these scores being awarded in September 2007 (when the wines were evaluated for "en primeur" sale):
United States of America
  Wine Advocate (Robert Parker)
  Wine Spectator (James Suckling)
United Kingdom
  Jancis Robinson
  Decanter (Steven Spurrier, James Lawther, Serena Sutcliffe)
France
  Tast (Michel Bettane, Thierry Desseauve)
  La Revue du Vin de France (Bernard Burtschy)
  Le Point (Jacques Dupont)

The scores have been converted to a 0-100 scale (many wine commentators use idiosyncratic scoring schemes), and all wines were evaluated by all commentators. (Many more wines were evaluated, but only 27 were evaluated by all of the commentators.) The manhattan distance measure was calculated between each pair of commentators, and the result displayed as a NeighborNet network. People who are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on their scoring patterns, and those who are further apart are progressively more different from each other.

Click to enlarge.

Note, first, that there is considerable conflict among the critics — they certainly don't agree with each other uniformly. Wine tasting is an art not a science.

Second, note that the biggest split (bipartition) separates the English- and French-speaking commentators from each other, with the exception of Jancis Robinson, who is apparently a Francophile. The French clearly do not have the same view of their wine as do some other people.

Finally, there are some long terminal edges, indicating that a lot of each opinion is unique to that commentator, except for James Suckling, who apparently has fewer opinions of his own. As I noted, wine tasting is an art not a science.

This analysis was an exploratory one, looking for shared data patterns. It seems worthwhile, however, to pursue the origins of these differing expert opinions. That is, we need a directed graph rather than an undirected one. If we nominate Robert Parker as the outgroup to the others, as he obviously is to anyone who knows about him, then we can produce a rooted reticulation network using the method of Huson et al. (2005, Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 3500: 233–249). In this diagram the blue lines indicate "hybridization" histories.

Click to enlarge.

There appear to be three hybrid results, so that there are four "pure" wine evaluations and three "hybrid" ones. First, the Decanter opinion (Spurrier_Lawther_Sutcliffe) is a combination of the opinions of the Wine Advocate (Parker) and Le Point (Dupont) + Robinson. Second, the Wine Spectator scores (Suckling) are a hybrid of those of the Wine Advocate and Tast (Bettane_Desseauve). Third, the Revue du Vin de France outcome (Burtschy) is a hybrid of Robinson's and Tast's. Note that each of these hybrid opinions is a cross-cultural (French-English) mixture! The world of wine truly is international.

I think that this adequately sums up the world of wine criticism. Everyone's opinion is mostly someone else's, modified in response to someone else again.