Old World and New World Sparkling Wines: Consumer Decisions and Insights for Retailers

The objective of this research is to examine consumer demand for sparkling wines. We developed a laboratory experiment to collect data on consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for selected wines from France, Spain, and the United States (Finger Lakes) under different information treatments. Our results suggest that expenditures and consumption frequency for all wines are most important to WTP and notably that familiarity with sparkling wines was relatively important for the “local” U.S. wine among the consumers in our sample. We discuss the important implications of our findings for managers of small U.S. wineries building their reputations and for restaurants and other food service outlets interested in attracting a broader consumer base.