(Futurity) - Economist Karl Storchmann has always loved wine—so much so that, years ago, before he moved to the US from Germany, he even tried his hand at making his own. From 1994 to 1999, when he was working for the Rhine-Westphalian Institute for Economic Research, he cultivated a small vineyard in his free time. “I pruned and trained the vines, and I made some wine—not a lot, like 350 bottles,” Storchmann, now at New York University, recalls with a smile. “It was really fun.”

In a roundabout way, what began as a hobby would come to influence the course of his career. In 2004, Storchmann got a job as a professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, which was just beginning its transformation into a new destination for wine. Surrounded by vineyards, Storchmann got an idea.

He and some wine-loving colleagues approached the college about sponsoring a Journal of Wine Economics. “We thought it was going to be a very small thing for like 50 people,” Storchmann says. For the first issue in 2006, they only printed a hundred copies.

A decade later, the peer-reviewed journal—now published by Cambridge University Press, with Storchmann as managing editor—has something like 3,000 subscribers from colleges and universities around the world.

“In the beginning it was laughed at by our colleagues who thought we were just looking for an excuse to drink wine,” says Storchmann, one of the founding members of the American Association of Wine Economists, which oversees the journal. But over time the economics of wine has become its own surprisingly rigorous discipline, with intersections in the fields of marketing, law, and even environmental science.

What determines the price of wine?

On some level, the basic rules of economics apply. There’s supply and demand, of course: Wine that’s scarce will be more expensive, while the more plentiful stuff is cheaper. It follows, too, that higher quality wine should cost more. But how do you evaluate quality? That’s where things get tricky.