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This paper investigates the impact of social media practices on wine sales in US wineries as perceived by winery owners and general managers. An online survey research methodology involving a sample of 375 US wineries was used to gather data. MS Excel software was used to analyze data, including descriptive statistics and ANOVAs. Results illustrate that 87 per cent of wineries in the sample report a perceived increase in wine sales due to social media practices. Using multiple social media platforms, rather than just a couple, is statistically significant with reported increases in wine sales. Wine marketers in the United States would benefit from adopting social media into their marketing mix, especially smaller wineries. The results suggest to start with Facebook and to ensure the winery owner responds to consumer comments on TripAdvisor and Yelp.

In the United States, labelling for wine containing at least 7% alcohol by volume is regulated by the Tax and Trade Bureau, which does not require wine labels to include ingredient or nutrition labelling, except for added sulfites. With the European Union moving toward mandatory disclosure of nutrition and ingredient information for wine, one may expect the level of debate in the U.S. to increase. We conducted an online survey of consumers in the U.S. who are at least 21 years old (legal drinking age in the U.S.) and consume wine at least once every two or three months to determine their interest in wineries disclosing ingredient and nutrition information for wine. We asked about the importance of ingredient information when deciding which wine to purchase and when determining willingness to pay, and we asked about the importance of nutrition information when deciding which wine to purchase. We separately regressed three dependent variables against Wine Consumption (frequency), Price, Physical Activity, Diet, Wine Knowledge, Age, Income, and Education. Overall, respondents indicated that having ingredient and nutrition information was only somewhat important, with mean responses 3.04 on a 5-point scale (1 = Not Important, 5 = Very Important) for ingredient information when choosing a wine, 3.01 for ingredient information when determining willingness to pay, and 2.48 for nutrition information when choosing a wine. The factor with the greatest impact on interest in ingredient information was Price, with consumers who buy a higher-end wine at least monthly having a higher level of interest, followed by Diet, with consumers with a healthy diet having a higher interest in ingredient information, and Age, with older consumers having less interest in ingredient information. Price, Diet, and Age also had the greatest impact regarding interest in nutrition information, following the same direction but with Age being the most significant.

Wine tasting rooms in the United States play an important role in the wine industry and the economic vitality of the regions that wine tourists visit, as wine tourists are generally well-educated and affluent, and they eagerly buy wine when they experience “pleasure” with their wine tourism experience (Bruwer & Rueger-Muck, 2019). When the COVID-19 pandemic forced many winery tasting rooms to shut down for months and operate under severe constraints once allowed to reopen, many wineries turned to virtual wine tastings to stay engaged with their consumers and attract new ones. This paper is an exploratory study of the features of a virtual wine tasting that participants in the U.S. find most engaging. We adopted the concept of winery tourism as a hedonic experience as the framework for our study of virtual wine tastings and apply the experiential view first applied to wine tourism by Bruwer and Alant (2009) to create an online survey employing the Best – Worst methodology first published by Finn and Louviere (1992). We collected 261 valid responses from people in the U.S. who participated in at least one virtual wine tasting. Using the classic agglomerative method, we performed unsupervised clustering on the raw survey response data to identify five main clusters of virtual wine tasting participant segments.

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