Goal
Map the wine world through network analysis. Using WineEnthusiast reviews, build graphs that link countries, regions, varieties, and tasters, then use centrality measures (PageRank, betweenness) to find the hubs, the versatile varieties, and the best value-for-money wines.
Dataset
Wine reviews from WineEnthusiast (via Kaggle, scraped by Zack Hout in 2017): 130k rows, 13 columns including country, province, region, variety, taster, points, and price. After dropping missing values, I focused on the first 1,000 European rows to keep networks readable and avoid overrepresenting any single region.
Three Networks
- Country–Variety: which countries dominate, which grape varieties travel widely
- Region–Variety: 58 regions × 104 varieties, a finer view of where each wine grows
- Tasters × Region × Variety × Quality/Price: the human layer, weighted by value
Country–Variety Headlines
Italy and France lead PageRank by a wide margin, confirming the obvious. Portugal ranks 3rd, which is less obvious. On the variety side, Red Blend, Riesling and White Blend show up everywhere, making them the most country-agnostic grapes in the dataset.
Top Varieties (PageRank): Red Blend 0.052, Riesling 0.049, White Blend 0.048, Nebbiolo 0.041, and Chardonnay 0.038
The Region–Variety Network
Zooming in from countries to regions makes the structure visible. Sicily & Sardinia emerges as the most central region (highly connected to many varieties), while Veneto takes the highest betweenness, meaning it bridges different parts of the network and links varieties that otherwise wouldn't connect.
The Value Wine
Layering quality-to-price ratio onto the taster–region–variety network surfaced one clear winner.
The likely explanation: producers in lower-cost regions can replicate the style of expensive Chardonnays (which usually trace back to Burgundy) through careful sourcing and modern winemaking, hitting similar flavor at a fraction of the price.
The Taster Bias Problem
The biggest limitation of this analysis is also the most human one: tasters disagree, and they don't even disagree consistently. Some critics run high, others run low, and the same wine gets very different scores depending on who reviews it.
The Cramele Recaș was reviewed by Roger Voss and Anna Lee C. Iijima, both seasoned tasters with 20+ reviews, but Anna in particular skews high. So "best value wine in Europe" carries an asterisk: it's the best under these reviewers' palates, on this dataset, in this window.
Takeaway
Network analysis surfaces structure that traditional wine classifications miss, such as versatile varieties, bridging regions, and hidden value bottles. But numbers can only take you so far. Wine is still an experience, and the right wine for you is the one you actually want to drink again.