(Forbes) - Forward thinking isn’t exactly the hallmark of a government protected business, but that’s the suggestion to wine distributors found in Wine Analytics: Fine Wine Pricing and Selection under Weather and Market Uncertainty, a paper put forth by researchers Burak Kazaz, Mert Hakan Hekimoğlu (both at the Whitman School of Management, Syracuse University) and Scott Webster (W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University).

The study addresses a market most American wine distributors eschew: wine futures. The researchers postulate that by entering the futures market, distributors could improve profits as much as 21%. According to researchers, the study was based on “the world’s largest wine distributor that does not invest in wine futures due to lack of knowledge about futures prices and their evolution to bottle prices.”