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Sunday, January 8, 2006
The Owner of ‘Wine Opinions’ Research Firm Responds
On Dec. 28, I posted an entry entitled Decanter Magazine vs. Robert Parker: a Good Ole’ Cat Fight, about the escalating rhetoric between the British-based magazine and the world’s most influential wine critic.
That posting prompted a couple of e-mails from John Gillespie, owner of Wine Opinions, a research firm whose survey of wine drinkers was part of the brouhaha. Gillespie corrected me that …
… it was him, and not Decanter magazine, which issued the press release that suggested a “backlash” against Parker’s influence on wine-buying decisions. The magazine did send out an e-mail alert to the survey and released it under its “Latest News” heading late last month.
Here are excerpts of what else Gillespie had to say:
I am the owner of Wine Opinions, an Internet consumer research provider to the wine industry. My partner, Christian Miller, and I have more consumer research experience in the U.S. wine industry than anyone else. I also am the president of Wine Market Council, a non-profit trade association working to increase wine consumption in the U.S. Our Wine Market Council ongoing consumer research dates back to 1994. We are, in fact, holding a conference in St. Helena to announce the results of the most recent council research.
As you can see (from the Wine Opinions original press release), Decanter did not “glean a backlash.” We used the term to describe the fact that for every person who finds Parker’s ratings somewhat or very influential, there are three people who go out of their way to say he exerts absolutely no influence on them.
Please note that we make no analysis or qualitative judgment of Mr. Parker’s ratings or his point-of-view. We do state in the study that he is indeed quite influential with a significant number of high-end consumers - more, in fact, than the sum total of persons who either read the Wine Advocate or visit Parker’s site. We merely point out that he also carries significantly higher negative consumer responses than any other critical venue. Decanter and everyone else who reviews our survey results can draw their own conclusions, but the creation, execution, and analysis that comprises the Core Track report (of which the Parker/Spectator influence segment was one of several) is peer-reviewable and scientifically sound.
I e-mailed Mr. Gillespie a few questions about the use of the term “backlash,” which I thought suggested a change in consumers’ opinions over time, and about our not being able to see the wording of the questions without paying the nearly $500 Wine Opinions is charging for copies of the study. He replied:
Our use of the term “backlash” was not to describe an event over time (we might have used “erosion,” “reversal,” or “waning” of influence if that is what we had meant). This is not a study comparing responses over time, though we will ask this question again in a survey next year and at that point we will have tracking data. Backlash can, indeed, imply an event over time, but it also means an adverse reaction to a thing or event. In this case, what we mean is that Parker’s high negative ratings counter the small but strongly positive response to his reviews. Again, we do not conclude that Robert Parker is either not influential or is losing his influence, only that he polarizes high end consumers to the extent that his negatives (lowest rating) outweigh his positives (top two ratings) by a ratio of 3 - 1. The key point is not that Parker has fewer people citing him as very or extremely influential - it’s that the distribution of his ratings between none to moderately influential is extremely skewed towards “1 (no influence at all)” when compared to other media sources. For example, Parker elicits more than twice the percentage of negative “1” ratings as does the Wine Spectator - or any other media venue included in the survey.
While we have not posted the survey questionnaire itself, there are a number of charts and graphs on the Wine Opinions site that show data taken directly from the response tabulations. You can see these at this link: http://wineopinions.com/december-core-track.html#. We do not release the questionnaire, full data tabulations or the report itself, because it is for sale, and has already been purchased by leading wine producers, importers, and wholesalers in the U.S.
So there you have some clarifying comments from Mr. John Gillespie.
Cheers!
Mark Fisher
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