Post by Hanjo Odendaal

🍇Ever wondered what happens when 60 million wine pours turn into data? 🍷🗿 With Edward Kerby In our new paper, we dive into one of the largest wine datasets ever assembled (over 60 million user-generated reviews from Vivino) to understand how consumers talk about wine, how that language evolves and what it reveals about global taste. Rather than focusing only on scores or prices, we analyse the words themselves. Using computational linguistics and topic modelling to map how people describe what they drink. [Findings]: - 🧠 Digital prompts matter: simple flavour suggestions accelerate the shift from novice to "expert-like" tasting language - 📈 Learning by doing: engaged users adopt structured flavour descriptors more than 3× faster than their baseline - 🌍 Global palate trends: citrus-driven, fresher white wine styles dominate, while heavier, oak-driven profiles are declining - 🔗 Language is information: large-scale consumer text reveals flavour patterns, regional reputations and market trends that traditional expert reviews often miss - ⚖️ From “Plebs to Pros”: online platforms are actively shaping how consumers learn, describe and evaluate wine The broader implication is that consumer-generated language is not just noise, but a rich, scalable signal that can complement (and sometimes substitute) traditional expert opinion. For producers, retailers, wine regions, and online platforms, this opens up new opportunities: (1) pricing and positioning → (2) to recommendation systems → (3) to digital storytelling grounded in how people actually talk about wine. 📄 Paper Title: Plebs to Pros: A Data-Driven Dive into 60 Million Wine Reviews https://lnkd.in/dxmbq7at #wineeconomics #bigdata #consumerbehaviour #textanalysis #digitalmarketing #wineindustry #vivino #sensoryscience #ecommerce