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Ensuring an excellent visitor experience and meeting customer expectations is a key goal for most tourism businesses and of primary concern to government industry organisations. The Better Business Tourism Accreditation Program, underpinning a broad tourism accreditation initiative, has been implemented in Victoria across a range of tourism sectors. The program provides business management and operational guidelines for tourism businesses. Winery tourism, the process of visiting a Winery and the associated cellar door experience, is now acknowledged as an important part of regional tourism in Victoria. To assist in establishing benchmarks for cellar door operations the Victorian Wineries Tourism Council, in consultation with the industry, has developed Cellar Door sector guidelines. The program assists winery operators to identify and document cellar door operational procedures that contribute to the visitor experience. This article discusses the development of the Better Business Tourism Accreditation Program and Cellar Door sector guidelines, and feedback gained from a series of industry workshops. These workshops addressed concerns raised by participants and provided them with support in completing the accreditation program. A self‐complete questionnaire was administered at the workshops that sought to identify participant views on cellar door activity, the importance of tourism and accreditation. The results suggest that accreditation can provide a useful means of identifying and implementing business and operational practices that will improve the cellar door experience for visitors.

Wine tourism has emerged as a growing area of special interest tourism in Australia, and is an increasingly significant component of the regional and rural tourism product of Western Australia. The increased significance and growing competitiveness of this sector has led to a heightened concern by producers and consumers for the quality of services being offered, and has forced many within the industry to invest in the delivery of higher levels of service quality as a means to achieving competitive differentiation. An integral part of any organisation’s attempt to deliver on this front is a commitment to a process of continuous quality improvement. This requires a systematic approach to quality measurement. Investigates the conceptualisation and measurement of service quality and its importance to the wine tourism industry and reports the findings from a recently‐conducted survey of cellar door customers at four Western Australian wineries. Demonstrates the relative usefulness of the importance/performance methodology for cellar door operators in highlighting how wineries are performing from a customer point of view, and also what is important in terms of performance from the customers’ point of view.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of customer perceived value on behavioural intentions in a cellar door context, and to examine the role of satisfaction as a mediator of the customer perceived value‐behavioural intentions relationship.

A multi‐dimensional measure of customer perceived value was used to determine which aspects of the cellar door experience were valued by visitors and how value dimensions impact on subsequent wine purchase intentions. Data collected from visitors to wineries of the Margaret River and the Swan Valley regions in Western Australia were used to empirically test a model of customer perceived value on behavioural intentions with satisfaction posited as a mediating variable. Multiple regression was employed to test hypothesised relationships.

Results indicate that four out of five dimensions of customer perceived value (service quality, technical quality, price, and social value) have a positive impact on the behavioural intentions of cellar door visitors with overall satisfaction partially mediating the relationship.

The data were collected from only one country. Future studies can investigate customer perceived value relating to cellar door visits in a cross‐cultural context covering a wider spread of wine regions. Furthermore, longitudinal research could determine the impact of the customer perceived value dimensions on the actual purchase of the wineries' wines from retail outlets and restaurants.

This paper provides winery managers with valuable information on how cellar door experiences can be improved across a range of different value dimensions.

This paper is the first to empirically test customer perceived value in a cellar door setting.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of cellar door sales in wineries and test a method of assessing service quality using the services mapping approach, for the purposes of enhancing research in this important area.

Service mapping involved a group of students in using participant observation techniques to map service quality at three stages of the winery visit: approach and entry; the cellar door; departure and other observations. Observers were instructed to use all five senses in making their observations, i.e. the look, smell, sound, taste and feel of the experience. Physical evidence and staff interactions were also recorded and invisible management processes were implied.

Each of the three wineries studied provided a distinct theme and presentation, sensorial experience and level of service quality based on the observations. The technique of service mapping could provide winery and cellar door managers with unique insights into the totality of the cellar door visitor experience.

Research on cellar door service quality has implications for the presentation of the wine brand and corresponding brand awareness, loyalty and sales. This research method has utility in assessing the cellar door experience and associated cellar door and winery management processes.

This is the first time that service mapping has been used to assess the cellar door experience. It has provided some new and useful insights for researchers and managers in the wine industry.

Wine tourism has gained increased coverage in the last 4–5 years. Recognised as an effective aid to distribution and brand building, both industry and academia have developed research and strategies for increasing the effectiveness of how wineries manage wine tourism. This paper synthesises the findings from two recent conferences and argues that in order to be successful wineries will need to pay more attention to strategies that attract repeat visitors. This requires a relationship marketing strategy.

Wine tourism is an area of growing interest because of its potential to contribute to regional development and employment at times of rural restructuring, particularly through the development of inter and intra industry networks. This paper provides a review of wine tourism, briefly discusses networks and their value, then analyses the development of wine tourism networks in Australia and New Zealand. The research indicates that although wine tourism network development is being actively encouraged, substantial difficulties exist because of the perception by many in the wine industry that they are not part of tourism. The paper concludes that while the development of new organisational structures to encourage wine tourism development are useful, they must be complimented by research on linkages, education of potential network members in order to close information gaps; and the development of network structures which maximise the overlap and linkages mat exists between the wine and tourism industries.

The broad area of the wine industry and the marketing of wine, particularly, are focused on with regard to the changing environment in which wine is made and consumed. The marketing process is described in the context of its application in the wine industry and the environment in which it operates: changing consumption patterns in the industrialised nations, new distribution patterns, and different social and environmental issues. The segmentation of the wine market into two distinct areas, fine wines and beverage wines, each operating independently of the other, is described and the marketing mix factors which the wine marketer can deploy in order to maximise opportunities in these markets are detailed, utilising research into wine consumers' behaviour. The factors detailed are the product, its tangible and intangible benefits; the price — market skimming, market penetration, neutral pricing; the communication mix — word of mouth, journalism, sales promotion, advertising; branding and positioning; ranging, and the distribution channels. It is shown that marketing planning is essential for the winemaker, whether a one‐person boutique winery or a large multinational. The steps to take in preparing a marketing plan are described and guidance is given so that the winemaker can make it happen, both to satisfy consumers' needs and to make a profit.

This paper aims to define the boundaries of wine tourism to identify the main challenges, trends and opportunities of wine tourism in Portugal, providing some critical recommendations for those operating in this sector.

The paper draws on a literature review and content analysis of prior and ongoing work.

The main challenges, trends and opportunities for the wine tourism industry in Portugal are identified, as well as suggestions and practical recommendations/contributions for managers, stakeholders, players and marketers. The paper concludes with some key points that could form the basis of a strategic agenda for future action.

Based on the reviewed literature, some benchmarks for the wine tourism industry in Portugal were developed.

The purpose of this paper is to use the experiential view of consumption to better understand the nature of the motivations of the wine tourist in a congested wine region environment. It also aims to determine the impact of travel antecedents such as the perceived characteristics of the wine region, information sources utilised, and previous knowledge of the region and its products on the destination decision‐making process and ultimately the visitation motivations.

Information is obtained from a random sample of 304 respondents from 12 wineries representing all size groups situated on the Paarl Wine Route (PWR) in South Africa. Data are collected through the use of a self‐administered, highly structured questionnaire, self‐completed by respondents at each of the winery cellar door venues.

The most important characteristic of the entire winescape is the region's scenic beauty. Other high impact characteristics are the friendly people and their hospitality, overall ambience and the diversity of wine estates. These factors point to hedonic behaviour in a highly social context and primarily a search for enjoyment/pleasure, mainly by first‐time visitors. The dynamic of first‐time and repeat visitation plays a key role in visitors' wine tourism behaviour. The decision to engage in wine tourism is generally impulsive, even spurious, the visit duration short and the motivations guiding the visitors' behaviour predominantly hedonic in nature.

The impact of the natural landscape underlines the premise that an experiential research approach can yield valuable insights and sheds new light on the fact that a memorable experience for a wine tourist does not only evolve inside the winery's cellar door. In the process it exposits what could be unique selling points for marketing differently positioned wine regions.

This study is of value to academic researchers, travel and accommodation providers and wine industry practitioners alike as it highlights important aspects of wine tourism behaviour with regard to the actual (underlying) motivations that drive them to visit cellar doors in a wine region.

This paper seeks to investigate the conceptualisation and measurement of the service quality construct and its relationship to behavioural intention through an application of the importance‐performance technique within the Australian wine tourism industry. Many winery operators invite customers to their winery and the quality of service during the visit can impact on future wine sales. Research undertaken among a sample of visitors to Australian vineyards showed that service process factors were more closely linked to wine purchase than tangible elements. The study also provides further support for the use of importance‐performance models of service quality, as this measure was found to be significantly related to two dimensions of behavioural intention.