Written by Tony Aspler | 24 June 2011

The American Association of Wine Economists is a “non-profit, educational organization dedicated to encouraging and communicating economic research and analyses and exchanging ideas in wine economics.” Twice a year they publish a journal with papers on such learned and sleep-inducing subjects as “Identification of Stochastic Processes for an Estimated Icewine Temperature Hedging Variable” and “Unobserved Heterogeneity in the Wine Market: An Analysis of Sardinian Wine using Mixed Logit.”

But there is nothing like introducing sex into wine to capture this writer’s attention. Recently posted on AAWE’s Web site was a working paper by Mara Squicciarini and Jo Swinnen, two economists at the University of Leuven, entitled “Women or Wine? Monogamy and Alcohol.”

The abstract reads: “Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. (Editor’s note: polygyny is not a spelling error but the correct term for men with multiple wives.) We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world.”

Written by Tony Aspler | 11 May 2011

What Vegemite is to the Aussies, retsina is to the Greeks. Over generations their palates have become acculturated to the taste of resin in their wine. As early as 2700 BC, Greek wine merchants were using the gum of pine trees to seal the porous clay amphorae in which they stored and transported their wines. The resinous flavour infused itself into the wine or, to non-believers, contaminated it.

For the uninitiated the taste descriptor could be an anagram of the name (retsina: nastier); but it is still the most popular wine in Greece, accounting for some 30 per cent of white wine production there. According to Perikles Drakos, the Export Director of Tsantali wines, Greeks drink more white wine than they do red (“It’s rare to see anyone ordering red wine from May to September”) and retsina is the most popular white (“Your friends will say, ‘let’s go out for retsina’”). They will even mix retsina with Coca Cola, says Drakos, to make a popular drink called Toumbo Libre.

While retsina might be the Greeks’ wine of choice it was not readily available in the President Hotel where I stayed in Athens recently. Nor was it on the wine list in a typical country restaurant called Sofos in the town of Nemea, the birthplace of Hercules.