All Working Papers

Storytelling is a powerful marketing tool. It represents a form of content marketing that appeals to the imagination of the consumer. We have studied the use of storytelling by Georgian wine makers. As a wine country, the former Soviet republic of Georgia has a compelling story to tell. The country represents the cradle of wine and has an unbroken 8000 year old history of wine production. In addition to the story of the origin of Georgian wine, the country is still producing wine in a tradition that dates from the antiquity. The Qvevry production method is still in use in Georgia and produces wine with a very characteristic taste. Furthermore, some of the vineyards in Georgia has a long history and is related to historical buildings often depicted on the label of the wine bottle. Finally, the grapes are originally from Georgia and has been grown here for thousands of years. We have followed four vineyards and their history in order to depict how storytelling is used the wine industry in Georgia.

The aim of the study is to scientifically explore the role of paper and embellishments of wine labels in driving consumers’ visual behaviour on the shelf, their perception of the product and their purchase choices. Thirty labels were created combining six types of papers and six types of embellishments. Thirty target consumers explored the shelf first without any specific tasks, and then with the goal to choose a bottle of wine, while their visual behaviour were recorded through a wearable eye-tracker.
Subsequently, the consumers were exposed to each single bottle. They had to watch each bottle for 15 seconds and then to handle it for the same amount of time. During this phase their visual behaviour and their brain activation were recorded respectively by a wearable eye-tracker glasses and an EEG headset.
After the test, an in-depth interview was conducted to assess the rational perception, the expectations, the intention to buy and the willingness to pay for the wine bottles. Results highlighted the role of both paper and embellishment in enhancing label visual saliency and equity on the shelf and in influencing consumers’ perception, expectation and purchase behaviour. Moreover, an interesting reciprocal influence of visual and tactile features on each other was found.

This study provides preliminary insight into the challenges and opportunities present for wine in the process of adaptation to the modern business environment. This study is being conducted within the Swiss wine sector due to the unique characteristics and value of Swiss wine, culture, and the capacity to access key individuals within the Swiss wine sector and its supporting network. These specific features of the Swiss wine sector offer the potential to probe respondents for depth of information on digitization, whilst maintaining more control over extraneous variables that may otherwise impact research results.
This study utilizes the Delphi method for the purpose of investigating the opinions, ideas and suggestions of key individuals in the Swiss wine sector. Each respondent’s feedback is being collected for the convergence of ideas and process of implementation. Divergent responses will all be compiled and synthesized, before returning an anonymised compilation to every respondent for subsequent review and comment. Subsequent rounds of this process will continue until data saturation is achieved. The results of this study will be used to prepare a framework outlining the process and scope of considerations in the successful digitization of the Swiss wine sector.

Data was sought from all wineries producing more than 10,000 cases per year across all of California wine regions. 219 such wineries were identified yielding a representative sample of 106 producers across the state. Women were found to represent 38.1% of all leadership roles in the industry. As wineries grow larger, the percentage of women tends to decline. Women tend to be over-represented in staff roles and under-represented in line positions, which is consistent with other US industry. California’s wine industry has made significant progress in bringing women into management roles in the industry. Recommendations are offered for further improvement.

The fact that Canada domestically grows Vitis vinifera and produces various types of table wines may still come to some as a surprise, yet it is true. The geographic location and common association of Canada with a cold climate, the relatively small size of the Canadian wine industry (especially in comparison to wine giants like France or the United States (US), for example) are the main reasons why the industry still lacks international exposure. Because of that, to the average wine consumer in the world, Canada still is not known as being able to grow vinifera and supply domestically made table wines. If anybody in the world happens to know that Canada produces wines, it is usually because of ice wines. Canadian ice wines remain the most frequently recognized in the world as being Canadian-made and associated with Canada (Canadian Vintners Association Website statistics accessed on December 5, 2016: http://www.canadianvintners.com/info-centre/wine-statistics/).

The glass of wine that you are having with your dinner, whether in your own home, at a friend’s or a restaurant, is subsidized by the federal taxpayer whenever the growers who produced the grapes that went into the wine protected themselves from a financial loss due to crop failure by purchasing crop insurance. The subsidy has the effect of lowering the price of that glass of wine by reducing the full cost of growing the grapes provided the resulting economic gain is passed along at least in part to the winery and in turn to the vintner, retailer, and finally the consumer.
It follows that crop insurance is a blend of private and social insurance because the cost to the grower of insuring against a crop failure, which is included in the cost of production, no longer is entirely privatized. It is shared with the public through a taxpayer-supported subsidy.
Our objective in the following is to describe the need for crop insurance and its origins, the specific details of the protection for U.S. growers, the private and social costs of producing grapes, and the role of the Agriculture Department. In the following, we do not address table grapes, raisins, damaged vines, or federal area-wide crop insurance. That type of insurance protects the individual producer, not on the basis of his own personal loss, but on the average losses across the area where his vineyard is located. (ProAg nd, np).1 Much more research is needed for a more detailed account of insurance that focuses on wine grapes than is provided herein. To help facilitate that research we provide links to articles and books that examine in greater detail reinsurance, the history of wine grapes, licensing agents and brokers, the history of crop insurance prior to the New Deal, and written agreements between growers and insurers.
Our primary emphasis in the following is not on the grapes or the wine but on the human agents involved: the grower, the insurer, and the taxpayer.

Since the early 1990s, there has been a remarkable export boom of natural resource- based products from Chile, including wine, farmed salmon, forestry and wood prod- ucts. This phenomenon is surprising, considering the monopolistic role played by ad- vanced countries in these industries (e.g. Italy, France and Spain in the wine industry; Norway, Scotland and Canada in the salmon industry). It also raises questions on whether the conditions under which it is taking place are any different from those that in the past led to the repeated failures of a development model based mostly on the exports of natural resources.
From a traditional sector totally oriented to the domestic market and in deep crisis due to political and economic instability, the Chilean wine industry has gained international recognition since the early 1990s. It has become a large export-oriented industry -over 60 percent of the production is currently exported- together with other non-traditional industries such as salmon. Chile has been gradually identified by international con- sumers as an ideal country for producing modern varietal (fresh and fruity), good- value-for-money wines, and it has won worldwide recognition in the wine community faster than any other country in modern history (Phillips, 2000). This is a striking achievement, considering that until the 1970s Chilean wines were confined to the niche of decent-but-not-great wines, based on few varieties cultivated and the relative homo- geneity of their taste.
This paper analyses whether and how, under the globalizing trends that began in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Chile was able to transform some of its primary commodities such as wine into high-quality, diversified, processed goods, with increas- ing value-added content and export price per unit, thus becoming a platform for devel- opment. In particular, as a complement to previous studies, this paper looks specifically at the role of knowledge intensive services in the Chilean wine sector. It is based on the hypothesis is that these services have allowed Chilean wineries to add value to their wine exports and constantly improve their operations along the different stages of the value chain.
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes Chile’s remarkable wine export performance and reviews previous studies regarding the main factors that explain this expansion. Section 3 provides a description of the five main segments of the wine value chain and the multiple service inputs within each one of them. The motivations to produce these services in-house or subcontract are discussed in section 4. The results of a survey, carried out in the context of this study, to assess which services are produced in-house or outsourced are discussed in section 5. The last section con- cludes and provides suggestions for future research.