The Consumer Loves Typicality but Prefers the International Wine

One of the principal production alternatives in the wine sector is represented by choosing between international grape species in view of creating products with popular tastes or instead preferring autochthonous species capable of bringing out the typicalities of wines and their ties with the territory. The objective of this study is to estimate, with an experimental auction, the difference of willingness to pay for wines with different shares of international grape varieties. The results show that consumers have a general belief that determines a preference for wines made from autochthonous grape varieties. In fact, the values of auction offers limited to information about the grape variety used have shown a willingness to pay greater for wines produced with typical blends than with international blends. However, the auction experiment that uses blind tasting for the wines examined in our study has pointed out a substantial decrease of the premium price for autochthonous grapes varieties. This result therefore highlights the risks of a standardisation of productions and, consequently, a decline in the connection between the wine and the territory. A competition on homogeneous products would inevitably lead to a selection based solely on price, with a loss in terms of variety and quality of the wines and, especially, with the risk of weakening important territorial systems in economic and historical-cultural terms. Communication strategies also aimed at cultivating wine consumption appear to be the principal solutions to adopt in order to limit these dangers.