Appellation as an indicator of quality

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the consumer use of geographical information in the wine purchase decision. Consumers often rely upon the place of origin of a wine product in order to assess its quality. This research examines the importance of place‐of‐origin information and what level of place is meaningful to consumers, as well as which consumers utilize that information. Design/methodology/approach – Data collection took place by means of a highly structured online survey of 409 geographically dispersed wine consumers across the USA. Respondents were recruited by Survey Sampling International and screened for at least occasional wine consumption. Findings – Brand and place‐of‐origin information such as region, country and state were the most important attributes in the consumers' choice of a wine. One type of geographical indicator, appellation, was not well utilized. Core wine consumers and those with greater expertise utilized place‐of‐origin cues to a greater extent than less frequent and less knowledgeable consumers. Research limitations/implications – The study sample represents US wine drinkers and should not be taken as a general population sample. Potential respondents were required to have consumed at least one bottle in the last year in order to take the survey. The non‐probability sample includes participants from 46 states, 189 of whom are male and 211 are female. Practical implications – Wineries in established regions should increase their efforts to promote regional identity at the county, state and national level, to enhance their existing product images. Regional information is more heavily utilized by consumers than appellation information, which allows producers to take advantage of pre‐existing levels of awareness. This research suggests that marketers develop strategies to increase sales that emphasize larger regions such as county or state rather than appellations. Originality/value – This paper is of value to academic readers, wine industry practitioners and regional trade and tourism associations and other commercial entities that market their products with regional cues. The geographically dispersed sample provides results that generalize well to the wine consuming public.