Winetaster™ is a program that allows you to analyze the outcomes of a blind tasting of a number of wines by up to 15 "judges" and 12 wines. (A recent version allows most of the Winetaster functions to be performed for as many as 100 judges and 26 wines.) It performs various statistical tests to examine the extent to which the judges agree or disagree with one another, and which wines are (statistically) superior or inferior.

WINETASTER is a program that allows you to analyze the rankings or grades assigned to wines in a "blind" tasting by a number of judges. It gives you two basic options:

1. You can ask the participants in the tasting to "rank" wines, i.e., assign ranks such as 1 (for the one a judge liked best), 2, etc.
2. You can ask judges to "grade' the wines, i.e., assign grades such as "Parker grades" on a scale of, say, 1 to 100 or 1 to 20 or whatever.

The program will ask you to input the names of the "judges," their rankings or grades of the wines, and only after all the ranks or grades have been entered will it ask you to input the names of the individual wines (which should not be revealed before all the ranks or grades have been entered). (Normally, in a tasting you might be told which wines you will be drinking, but the bottles will be covered and identified only with letters such as A, B, C, etc., so that you do not know which wine is which).

WINETASTER will then compute a number of statistical measures in order to measure

• The degree of agreement or disagreement among the judges
• The ranksums for each wine (i.e., the sums of the ranks assigned to each wine by the various judges; the higher the ranksum to lower it is ranked)
• The correlation between the rankings (or grades) of each judge with the average ranking of the other judges (i.e., who is the "odd person out")
• The perceived quality of the wines by the group of judges and its statistical significance

The information that is computed is then arranged by the program in a ready-to-print report, with the additional option that you may add descriptive comments on the significance of the tasting.

To see what the output from this looks like, you can look at the results of the famous 1976 tasting of American and French wines.

For analyses of wines and other interesting information, check out Liquid Assets.