The Pour-igin of Species

Summary

In the end, one bottle had to emerge victorious. When looking at the entire scatterplot, and focussing on the bottom-right corner, a few bottles stand out as great deals. Below $20, the highest-ranked wines scored 4.3 stars, but these were all dessert or sparkling wines.For the best bet on a standard, dinner-ready, red or white wine, the crown goes to Mount Fishtail’s Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand’s Marlborough region.New Zealand wines are delicious and, ultimately, a better predictor of quality than any of the animals we looked at. Across all categories and variables, the only dataset that maintained its price as the quality increased was New Zealand wines. When in doubt, buy Kiwi.After years of searching for the perfect animal wine, it turned out it was being grown on a vineyard at the seat of Mount Fishtail, tucked away in the Marlborough Ranges, a short jaunt across the Cook Strait from Wellington, which is where I wrote this article.Cheers to that coincidence, and cheers to Mount Fishtail. Methodology Initial test data was manually collected across several New Zealand supermarkets. With hypothesis in hand, we expanded to programmatic collection.To get our initial list of wines, we queried a bunch of different filter combinations, including details like wine types (Red, White, Rosé, etc.), price range ($0–$10000+), and average rating (0–5 stars), and removed duplicates. For each wine, we collected the following: Vivino ID, name, year, winery, country, region, type, rating, number of ratings, price, currency, and a url with the image of the label. All details were collected in March 2024 and may not reflect current price or rating, especially if those have changed dramatically.To avoid over-prioritizing wines whose brands included animals, we limited each brand to one wine per type (Dessert, Fortified, Red, Rosé, Sparkling, White), choosing the wine with the most ratings as a proxy for which wine would be more well known.We then fed the label images into the O...