What animal shows its label

Making good wine is not easy. Identify it in the supermarket or the liquor shop either. There are those who look at the bottle includes a seal of Denomination of originin its price, the variety and the vintage, the reviews, if the winery presumes an important prize … and then there are those who pay attention to an a priori detail much more mundane: if the label has animals and if so. Maybe it sounds strange, but that a trout, an eagle, a lizard, a rabbit or a rampant lion appear in the bottle, it can be the key to hitting the choice.

In fact (and although it is not an infallible method) it is an important clue.

Wines with animals? Yes. And it’s nothing new. After checking the increasingly widespread fashion of labeling bottles with fish drawings, lions and other wild fauna (or even mythological), Peter Renton launched in 2016 a question Curious in Wine In Provence: “Why do people buy came with animals on the label?”

It is not a minor issue. The issue has already been touched on several academic studiesincluding one cited in 2008 by Science Daily in which it was pointed out that almost one in five tables of table wine released during the previous three years included an animal in its bottle. Commercial and “Perceptual fluidity” On the sidelines, the animal-life relationship leaves a question for consumers: can these animals help us to identify good offers?

What animals tell us. Recently journalists Fox Meyer and Jan Diehm They did An interesting experiment For The Pudding: They turned to AI to find out if the presence of animals in the bottles can give some clients about which wines are ‘better’. Its purpose was not so much identifying the good wines or those with the best price as those most interesting, understanding as such broths with notes higher than the average sold at medium or lower prices. That is, better positioned than normal at more affordable prices. Another of its objectives was to detect “overvalued”, expensive and bad.

To get this Meyer and Diehm handed two valuable resources: I livea specialized platform that includes prices and a qualifications system, and Chatgpt Vision. The first allowed him to collect bottles data and the second helped him categorize them based on animals included in the labels.

And what did you find out? They identified almost a thousand and a half wines (1,488) that had some type of fauna on their label. Then they classified them into 16 groups based on the “category” of the animal, leaving out the minority. The list includes amphibians and reptiles, bears, birds, insects, canids, felines, cattle, deer, fish, horses … and thus more than a dozen and a half of creatures, among which are included, for example, pachyderms or fantastic and mythological beings.

His next task was to calculate the average price of each of those groups. Espóiler: The most expensive wines were those that had amphibians and reptiles (average cost of $ 39.97), bears (31,55), mythological creatures (34,99) and felines (38,43). In general, wines with animals were however slightly cheaper than the average: the bottle cost 26.99, compared to almost 30 of the global average.

Price issue … and quality. Calculating prices was only the first part of the exercise. The other, just as relevant, was to estimate its classification. In that case the reptiles and amphibians “click”. They obtained a note of 3.95, below the general average of 4. The best positioned, all with 4.1 (in Vivino it is used A five -star ranking), were the bottles with bears, felines and mythological beings.

Beyond what concrete creatures appear on the labels, the investigation of Meyer and Diehm left an interesting first conclusion: from entry the bottles with animals are an interesting option for cost and quality. Its average price is slightly lower (three dollars) than wines that are not labeled with animals, although they have the same qualification on average.

“This means that, above all things, it is better to buy any animal than not buying any,” the two authors collect in The study.

But … What animals choose? The million dollar question. After all, between some animals and others there are considerable differences. Meyer and Diehm were fixed, for example, the bottles with farm and livestock animals had lower prices and valuations, quite the opposite that animals that can usually be found in heraldic shields, the most expensive and best valued.

The question is therefore … What wine is the one with the best value for money? To answer that issue Meyer and Diehm were fixed in the bottles of less than $ 150. And his conclusion was clear: the fish. 24.2% of the bottles with that labeling were in the group of “magical offers”, those with good price and good valuations if the stockings are taken into account.

Its average cost is $ 24.99 and the rating of 3.9, although much of the analyzed bottles reached a four -star or even higher note.

Eye to fish. “Fish is the best option. One third costs less than 20 dçolar and almost half has a four -star rating or more,” concludes the report, which slides a key of why these wines are well positioned: a good part of their offer are white, a broth that is suggested to pair with seafood and that in general show a medium lower price than the red wine.

And the rest of the animals? Among reptiles the percentage of “good offers” (quality-quality) is 5.3%, among the bears of 13%, birds show 16.5%, insects 21.4%, 10% canids, 9.6% felines, 13% cattle, 6% deer, 13.9% horses, 18.2% invertebrate sailors, 15.4% The pachyderms, 10.7% of pigs, 12% the rabbits and 19.3% the sheep.

Images | Terra Fossil (Flickr) and Eugene Kim (Flickr)

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