Guest editorial

As an area of research interest, wine tourism has grown substantially since its emergence in the 1980s and 1990s. The purpose of this special issue is to provide an opportunity to take stock of some of the developments in the field and highlight issues of both continuity and change. Although it is not the purpose to repeat earlier surveys of the wine tourism literature (Mitchell and Hall, 2006), this introduction to the special issue aims to contextualise the papers of the special issue within the wider context of contemporary wine tourism research.

Early research on wine tourism tended to have both a regional and a cellar door focus (Hall et al., 2000b). The regional interest was derived substantially from the focus by government and researchers on the economic development potential of tourism in relation to food and wine, especially within agricultural regions affected by economic restructuring and employment change (Hall et al., 2000a; Hall and Macionis, 1998; OECD, 2012), while the winery and cellar door focus was a clear response of the need to a better understanding of the characteristics and motivations of winery and cellar door visitors. A substantial early body of research exists on tourists’ experiences at the cellar door including their perceptions of service quality (O’Neill and Charters, 2000), motivation (Alant and Bruwer, 2004; Charters and Ali-Knight, 2002), perceived value (Gill et al., 2007), relationship to lifestyle (Mitchell and Hall, 2001) and post-visit behaviours (Mitchell and Hall, 2004), among others, including the development of an initial understanding of winery visitor demographics and characteristics. Some of these concerns remain in more recent research.

As Table I, which provides a systematic analysis of wine tourism-related journal articles in the Scopus bibliometric database, indicates, both a regional dimension and the winery/cellar door remain the primary foci of wine tourism research. Perhaps surprisingly given the role of place in consideration of wine as well as tourism, notions of terroir, place and winescape have not been a significant focus of wine tourism research although research has increased since 2010 (Bruwer et al., 2017; Popp and McCole, 2016). Even if destination-oriented research remains a major theme in wine tourism, a notable change is the extent to which wine tourism and marketing-oriented studies have expanded from their historic base in Australia and New Zealand (Hall and Mitchell, 2008) to provide a much wider geographical coverage encompassing both New World (Bruwer and Joy, 2017; Singh and Hsiung, 2016) and Old World (Mauracher et al., 2016; Molina et al., 2015; Riguccio et al., 2017) wine-growing areas as well as emerging wine regions (Chong, 2017; Kerma and Gačnik, 2015; Malm et al., 2013; Mazurkiewicz-Pizlo, 2016).

Development concerns and issues remain a major theme in wine tourism research, with continuing interest in the life course of wine tourism at both operational and regional levels (Deery et al., 2012; Dodd and Beverland, 2016), although there remains a surprisingly limited amount of research on wine tourism business decision-making and strategy (Alonso et al., 2015; Lavandoski et al., 2016; Stavrinoudis et al., 2012) and issues of entrepreneurship (Dawson, Fountain and Cohen, 2011) and innovation (Alonso and Bressan, 2016; Baird and Hall, 2016). Growing attention is being given to the potential issues arising from increased tourism numbers in wine regions and the policy and planning issues that arise (Yelvington et al., 2014; Xu et al., 2016), although research on sustainability in a wine tourism context, as opposed to sustainable winegrowing, remains limited (Gázquez-Abad et al., 2015; Grimstad and Burgess, 2014).

Issues of branding (Bruwer et al., 2017; Gómez et al., 2015), demographics (Sohn and Yuan, 2013), segmentation (Cho et al., 2017) and satisfaction (Hubbard et al., 2012; Mauracher et al., 2016) continue as major themes in the marketing dimensions of wine tourism. However, the hedonic aspects of wine consumption have increasingly been of interest to researchers (Bruwer and Alant, 2009; Charters et al., 2009), although the cellar door remains a major focus of research (Alonso et al., 2014; Bruwer and Lesschaeve, 2012; Bruwer et al., 2012; Bruwer et al., 2013; McNamara and Cassidy, 2015). While research on wine tourism continues to grow, this special issue has the objective of portraying the current state of research on the topic with specific reference to marketing issues.

Some of the papers included in this special issue were presented at the Australia and New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference (ANZMAC) held at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the beginning of December 2016. The papers that comprise this special issue cover both New and Old World wine regions. The papers cover a range of qualitative (e.g. content analysis), mixed (e.g. content analysis and survey) and quantitative methods (e.g. PLS-SEM) to explore a range of psychological and marketing concepts such as motivation (Quintal et al., 2017); brand personalities (Morrish et al., 2017); involvement, emotions and attachment (Santos et al., 2017); wine prestige and relationship quality (Loureiro and da Cunha, 2017); and the value attached by consumers to different information sources (Byrd et al., 2017a). This special issue also examines several provider issues such as benchmarking (Terziyska, 2017), signage (Byrd et al., 2017b) and the strategic profiling of wineries and value contribution of individual tourism activities (Dressler, 2017).

Quintal et al. (2017) use the dominant motivational framework of push and pull attributes to segment the Australian wine market. Despite the use of this framework extensively in tourism studies to understand the motivation of pleasure travellers (Prayag and Hosany, 2014), its application for segmentation purposes in the wine tourism context remains limited. Using focus groups and expert panels to finalise their survey instrument, the authors conduct a factor-cluster analysis, which is not without criticisms (Dolnicar and Grun, 2008; Prayag and Hosany, 2014), to identify four different segments (inspireds, self-drivens, market-drivens and inerts) motivated by factors such as winescape value, experience and bonding motivation, winescape staff and setting and wine quality. These authors demonstrate the need for an understanding of how segments differ with respect to their behavioural intentions regarding three different Australian wine regions (Swan Valley, Barossa Valley and Yara Valley). This approach offers wineries and wine regions an insight into how different markets are driven by different needs and such information can be used to improve targeting and positioning strategies.

Another issue of importance in marketing wineries is a clear projection of the brand personality of individual wine brands and wine estates. Morrish et al. (2017) compare the brand personalities of northern (Bordeaux and Napa) and southern (Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) hemispheres wine estates by content analysis of winery websites. Using textual analysis software, the authors uncover differences in how websites communicate Aaker’s (1997) five brand personality dimensions (sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness). By far excitement is the most common brand personality trait communicated across countries/regions, while sophistication is the least communicated. As noted by the authors, there seems to be a misalignment between the product (wine), which can be considered sophisticated and the communication strategy used by wineries in differentiating their estates from competitors. Overall, there are more similarities between the brand personalities of these different countries/regions than differences. This finding may well reflect the extent of development of the wine industry in these regions/countries, compared to emerging regions such as Bulgaria, which is the focus of the next paper.

Terziyska (2017) examines the emerging wine region of Bulgaria and attempts a benchmarking exercise of the wineries and identifies supply and production issues. Several important issues emerge in their content analysis of websites featured in the guide book on tourism-hosting wineries in Bulgaria. For example, only 31 per cent of all wineries were involved in any form of wine tourism activities and there are regional differences. While medium size wineries (16-45 hectares) are more common, wineries in general are producing fewer wines that can be considered as protected designation origin (PDO). The latter may have a negative influence on the quality, image and reputation of the destination. Though the final sample size and composition of the sample may not be representative of Bulgaria, the wineries attach high importance to tourism activities because of expectations of larger revenues.

The winescape has consistently emerged as an influential factor affecting tourist choice to visit and consume at a winery (Bruwer et al., 2017). Santos et al. (2017) examine several antecedents of behavioural intentions of tourists at wineries in Porto, Portugal. Specifically, personal involvement, product involvement, destination emotions and place attachment can significantly predict behavioural intentions of a sample of domestic and international visitors to four Porto wine cellars. Overall, the model proposed by the authors suggests that wineries in Porto can improve their positioning through understanding the emotional aspects of the destination experience as well as the extent to which visitors are personally involved in the wine experience. Generating positive word-of-mouth and revisit intentions will require these wineries to also understand the extent to which visitors feel attached to the wine cellar.

In examining the decision-making processes of tourists, Byrd et al. (2017a) use the enrichment theory to determine how previous experience affects how much and what type of information sources tourists will use when planning a visit to a winery. Previous research has shown that wine tourists do not make full use of the available information sources (Bruwer and Thach, 2013). Based on differences in cognitive processing activity, Byrd et al. (2017a) also examine whether gender has a significant influence on how many external information sources are evaluated. Based on a visitor study of American wineries, the findings suggest that there is a significant increase in the number of information sources used as travel experiences increase. Gender is a statistically significant factor influencing the number of information sources considered as valuable in the decision-making process of visiting a winery, with females valuing a greater number of information sources. One interesting outcome of this research was that experienced wine tourists are more sensitive to the value of external information sources compared to novices.

Similar to Santos et al. (2017), Loureiro and da Cunha (2017) use PLS-SEM to examine the relationships between two antecedents (wine brand prestige and wine consumer experience) of customer satisfaction and its subsequent outcomes (wine brand image and word-of-mouth recommendations). The authors’ proposed conceptual model is based on the gaps identified from a systematic review of the literature on relationship quality (RQ), which showed a lack of studies on dyadic relationships and drivers of RQ for brands with unique heritage and which are positioned in the luxury wine segment. Their survey conducted at wine cellars in Porto confirmed their proposed model with the effect of wine brand prestige being larger than that of wine consumer experience on consumer satisfaction. Consumer satisfaction has positive effects on both wine brand image and word-of-mouth recommendations. An understanding of these relationships has implications for how wineries can manage and enhance RQ.

While managing the cellar door experience is quintessential for customer satisfaction and positive behavioural intentions, another critical aspect of the visitor experience is signage of wineries to facilitate wayfinding. Byrd et al. (2017b) evaluate wine tourism signage programs in the USA. Highway signage programs are important contributors to the success of wineries. The authors used an operational framework consisting of 18 different factors to evaluate signage programs. The actual size of the wine industry in a state did not indicate the types of programs that a particular state would have towards highway signage for wine tourism.

While improved wayfinding to wineries may potentially increase visitors to wineries, an associated provider issue is whether strategic groupings of wineries add value to tourism. The final paper in this special issue by Dressler (2017) examines this issue among German wineries, which are facing intense competition and diminishing customer loyalty. The author argues that wineries that consider tourism as an important part of their portfolio of services have a more viable strategic option for growth and success and uses three online panels of more than 300 German wineries to explore strategic business models and service extensions with a particular focus on tourism. The authors argue that wineries that are smaller in size and lack brand visibility have a better chance of success if they focus on developing services for tourists as part of their innovation management strategy. Such arguments have been a key rationale for winery involvement in tourism, as the emergence of wine tourism as a research topic and well illustrates the extent to which such research is marked by continuity, change and ongoing issues about the extent to which tourism and wine can be successfully integrated in business and marketing strategies at both firm and regional levels.