(Wine-Searcher) - Presidents can't have an effect on the harvest, can they? We thought we should check.

By now the excitement should be almost over, the results will be coming in and you'll have some idea who will wear the mantle of most powerful person on earth. But how powerful are they really?

Sure, the President of the United States can have a huge effect on millions of lives. Attitudes towards healthcare, the environment, fossil fuels, conservation, and social welfare affect Americans every day, while attitudes towards bombing the innards out of various foreign countries can have a quite devastating impact on the inhabitants of those countries.

Sure, POTUS can change lives, laws, policies and even the climate, but having an effect on wine is a little tougher. Yes, politicians can make things easy for wineries by liberalizing alcohol supply laws, but they can also go the other way and make life nigh unbearable, as we saw with the barbarous Volstead Act.

But a president can't affect the vintage; sun and rain are not yet at the White House's command and Mother Nature insists on running things to her own uninfluenced schedule. So we thought it might make an interesting story to compare the presidencies of the past 40-odd years and see who was lucky enough to be in charge during the good times – and who we can blame for the dud vintages.