Take that, wine snobs.

• Author: Reynolds, Eileen
• Position: Life in America

"People tend to feel guilty when they like the cheapest one, but that's actually awesome. It saves you a lot of bucks."

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY economist Karl Storchmann always has loved wine--so much so that, years ago, before he moved to the U.S. from Germany, he even tried his hand at making his own. From 1994-99, when he was working for the Rhine-Westphalian Institute for Economic Research, he cultivated a small vineyard in his free time. "I pruned and trained the vines, and I made some wine--not a lot, like 350 bottles," Storchmann recalls with a smile. "It was really fun."

In a roundabout way, what started as a hobby would come to influence the course of his career. In 2004, Storchmann got a job as a professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., which he describes as "a peculiar little village in the middle of nowhere" that was just beginning its transformation into a new destination for wine. Happily surrounded by vineyards, Storchmann got an idea: partnering with some economist colleagues who shared his appreciation for wine, he approached the college about sponsoring a Journal of Wine Economics. "We thought it was going to be a very small thing for like 50 people," Storchmann says. For the first issue in 2006, they only printed 100 copies.

A decade later, the peer-reviewed journal-now published by Cambridge University Press, with Storchmann as managing editor--has close to 3,000 subscribers from colleges and universities around the world. "In the beginning it was laughed at by our colleagues who thought we were just looking for an excuse to drink wine," says Storchmann, one of the founding members of the American Association of Wine Economists, which oversees the Journal but, over time the economics of wine has become its own surprisingly rigorous discipline, with intersections in the fields of marketing, law, and even environmental science.

What determines the price of wine? Well, it can be complicated. On some level, the basic rules of economics apply. There is supply and demand, of course: wine that is scarce will be more expensive, while the more plentiful stuff is less expensive. It follows, too, that higher quality wine should cost more, but how do you evaluate quality? That is where things get tricky. Buying wine is a little like buying a peach, Storchmann explains: "A peach can be awesome and juicy, or it can be mealy and dull--but you can't know which it is until you bite into it." Wine has a similar problem: before you get the bottle home and open it, you really do not know a thing about what is inside, so you are left looking for clues. These might include the thickness of the glass in the bottle or the length of the cork--factors that do not really affect how the wine tastes, but signal to the consumer the kind of expense that went...