Wine: Blind Tastes, Price Controls, and the Most Regulated Wine Market You’ve Ever Seen

This class takes us inside the Jewish wine economy of earlier centuries. We will see communities enforcing price ceilings, outlawing seller collusion, and appointing assessors to protect community members from being overcharged. In some places, the system became so aggressively strict: monopoly-style selling rights, blind tastings, barrels sealed by wine assessors, community-owned measuring jugs, and stiff fines for anyone who tried to sell wine off the books. Wine: Blind Tastes, Price Controls, and the Most Regulated Wine Market You’ve Ever Seen