Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine empirically the determinants of wine consumption for the case of the Greek economy. The Greek wine industry, although fast growing and developing faces the big problem of not being able to export its wine abroad. So, Greek wine is mainly bought and consumed by Greek inhabitants. Therefore, a solid understanding of
the consumption behaviour of Greek wine drinkers is essential in order to help the market identify both strong points and deficiencies. Greek wine companies do not have the required resources to acquire consumer relevant information to assist their strategic-decision making. Therefore, this study tries to cover this aspect by examining the relationship between Greek
consumer’s wine expertise and their respected wine consumption behaviour. In order to measure wine expertise we employ two different ways: first we implicitly ask the consumers to reveal to us their perceptions about their knowledge of wine; and second, through a wine knowledge test based on a set of multiple choice questions about both domestic and international wine varieties and styles. Then, we classify the consumers to three different wine-knowledge categories and we examine through an econometric model the relationships among their self-reported wine consumption behaviour and their (both real and perceptual) knowledge about wine, followed by some common demographics (like age, gender, income, employment level etc.) Our preliminary results suggest that there is a strong positive relationship between knowledge and consumption of wine. Although, age and gender are also major determinants, the most important factor is found to be real
knowledge as well as “their perception about wine knowledge”. This result suggests that Greek wine producers should focus towards better educating and connecting with their consumers in order to be able to promote their wines more
appropriately.