Everyone knows the name Ernest Gallo. With his brother Julio they started the E&J Gallo Winery in Modesto, California in 1932. In 70 years the winery grew to be the largest in the world. Some evidence of the scale of the Gallo Winery's operations can be found in the interview itself.

“We will crush this year [1971] somewhere around 650,000 tons of grapes. We will produce only somewhere in the area of 50,000 tons” (Gallo, 1995, p.31).

A ton of grapes produces about 150 gallons of wine (Gallo, 1995). In 1971 the Gallo winery produced about 105,000,000 gallons of wine. That's a large operation by any standard.

This paper is based on an interview with Ernest Gallo conducted during the period 1969–1971 by the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

The objective of this research is to devise a reliable and accurate scoring algorithm for awarding medals at a major U.S. wine competition that was described earlier by Hodgson (2008). The new algorithm is comprised of a two-tiered method that considers an award on the basis of a total medal score averaged across four judges per each evaluated wine; and a reliability algorithm that grades the degree of inter-judge reliability according to the following criteria: <70% = Poor or Unacceptable; 70%–79% = Fair; 80%–89% = Good; and 90%–100% = Excellent agreement (Cicchetti, 2001). The method has advantages over a previous scoring method that based its decision upon incorrect estimates of majority opinion; and unacceptable levels of inter-judge agreement. (JEL Classification: C1, L15, Q13)

In this article, medium-run cycles in wine production in South Africa are extracted and related to similar cycles in real GDP per capita during the same period. In addition to removing noise in the historical data, smoothing out short-run fluctuations also eliminates the short-run impact on agricultural production due to idiosyncratic shocks such as weather events, wars, and vine diseases. By isolating the medium-run cycles, it is possible to verify the timing and duration of each cycle, matching it with the historical narrative. In this regard, a 300-year annual data series of South African wine production explains the evolution not only of one of the largest agricultural sectors, but of the South African economy in general. (JEL Classifications: C10, N57, Q10).