Assignment #1 (This Is an Individual Assignment)

ECO 395

2/3/06

Assignment #1 (this is an individual assignment)

On the course webpage (Course Materials) you will find the excel data on the wines that we worked on in class. Your boss is a wine connoiseur and has asked you to analyze this data for her. She is fascinated by wines harvested during the groovy period between 1970 and 1979. She would like to see two pieces of information.

(1)Show her a table that shows the average auction prices for each of the chateaus (i.e. vineyards) by vintage in the 1995 London auctions. In that table, please show the average auction price for all vineyards by vintage and also the average auction price for all vintage for all years by chateau.

(2)It is well known that the quality of any fruit, in general, depends on the weather during the growing season that produced the fruit. What is not so widely understood, is that in some localities the weather will vary dramatically from one year to the next. In California, for example, it never rains in the summer, and it is always warm in the summer. There is a simple reason for this. In California a high pressure weather system settles each summer over the California coast and produces a warm, dry growing season for the grapes planted there. In Bordeaux this sometimes happens--but usually it does not. Great vintages for Bordeaux wines correspond to the years in which August and September are dry, the growing season is warm, and the previous winter has been wet. Please show your boss a figure that displays for each vintage the summer temperature from low to high as you move from left to right, and the harvest rain from low to high as you move from top to bottom. She’d like for the axes of the figure to represent the average summer temperature and the average amount of harvest rains. Further, she’d be particularly impressed if you could show vintages that sell for an above average price in dark shading, and vintages that sell for a below average price in light shading.

1. If weather is the key determinant of wine quality, where would you expect the dark points to be clustered? Where would you expect the light points to be clustered? Does your figure confirm or refute your intuition?

For each exercise, please indicate on a separate sheet of paper how you put together this information. I will not suggest how to do it, for your boss is ignorant of the new technologies that are out there today. (You might page through Benninga for some hints, use Excel’s help feature, or figure it out on your own) Remember, that she will be using this to show her friends, so make sure it is neat, clean and easy to understand.