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The purpose of this paper is to provide clearer insights into and identify the key consumer behaviour metrics of the lower alcohol category (<11 per cent ABV) in the UK wine market.

Data were collected via an online survey from a sample size of 598 regular UK wine drinkers. To operationalise the study, five research questions were formulated. A highly structured quantitatively directed questionnaire was designed to find the answers to the research questions.

Barriers to a larger uptake of the product category included non-availability of the products, lower quality perceptions, taste issues, lack of awareness, lack of alcohol's “feel effect” and absence of a lower alcohol drinking occasion. Many UK consumers are not yet convinced how/if lower alcohol wine fits into their wine drinking occasions. The lower ABV wine buyer's main profile characteristics are weighted towards females, Millennial and Baby Boomer age generations, mostly mid to low income, who drink mainly white and rosé wines. Lower alcohol on its own is not seen as a big benefit, thus lower ABV wines should be more creatively communicated to sell the benefits.

This study contributes to the knowledge base in that it is the first to investigate consumer behaviour metrics as regards lower ABV wine in one of the world's leading markets, in the process providing some important baseline research information on this category. As such it is of value to academic researchers and practitioners alike.

Part of the steady decline of wine consumption in France might be attributed to a growing criticism of the level of alcohol content of the wines. Recent declarative surveys suggest that consumers consider favourably wines with lower contents of alcohol. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate experimentally the consumers' acceptability of a low‐alcohol wine, and to analyse the impact of the “low‐alcohol” cue on perceived quality.

Using the literature on expectancy disconfirmation and cognitive categorization, we have set up an experimental design involving blind tasting and full information tasting of three low‐alcohol wines and three regular wines on a sample of 73 consumers.

When comparing hedonic scores at blind level, there was no significant difference between low‐alcohol wine and regular wine. Expectations created by the “low‐alcohol” cue have a negative (but unsignificant) impact on overall evaluation, and individual characteristics have almost no effect on wine evaluation.

The small size of the sample group of respondents and the quasi‐experimental context with no control group were the major limitations of this study.

For the wine marketers, the most interesting result was that reducing the alcohol content to 9 per cent did not seem to result in the product being devalued significantly. The study highlighted the overwhelming effect of the sensory quality of the wine on perceived quality. “Low‐alcohol” cue creates a low quality expectation, but has only a small influence on perceived quality.

The wine industry is facing a continuous decrease in wine consumption on the part of the more frequent users of the product, particularly in the counties where wine drinking is traditional. The surveys show that alcohol is one important reason for not (or no longer) drinking. Several firms or research institutes are then turning to low alcohol wine as a solution to this problem, so far with limited success. Is the consumer ready to accept such a product in the first place? This paper is an attempt to identify those factors associated with the acceptance of a new product, taking low alcohol wine as an example. Acceptability of low alcohol wine is presented as an attitudinal model in which perception of product attributes, involvement in wine, consumption habits for wine and light products in general, personal innovativeness and consumption situations are determinant factors. This research suggests that low alcohol wine could get acceptance if the problem of the taste can be solved. In this case, low alcohol wine should be positioned as a wine rather than a diet drink.

Attempts to quantify the impact of de‐alcoholized, low and reduced‐alcohol wines on the UK wine market, from their appearance in the late 1980s, to the present day. Also assesses whether makers have been successful with the wines under discussion in their aim to capture a substantial percentage of the total wine market, examining the roles which the consumer and the marketing industry have played in the product and market development, and subsequently the wine's success or failure in attaining its goals. Particularly examines the role marketing may have to play in the future, if these products are to sustain market growth and finally gain acceptability as a purchase in their own right.

Consumer researchers are interested in the degree to which global convergence is occurring along with various consumer behaviour dimensions and to what extent the consumption patterns in different parts of the world are becoming similar. With increasing internationalisation and cultural cross‐fertilisation, the industrialised societies of the world are converging in many ways. Shifts in alcoholic beverage consumption patterns in Europe over the past 50 years may represent a case in point. As traditional cultural boundaries become blurred, consumer preferences for wine appears to be driven less by long‐standing local and regional traditions, and more by growing acceptance of a wider choice. The disparity of wine consumption among the 12 countries studied has also decreased. Other powerful forces are likely to accelerate the pace of convergence in the future.

After a period of 20 years of successful growth in sales in the international wine business, the upcoming International Alcohol Policy is endangering the economic sustainability of the wine business. To reduce alcohol‐caused hazards and harm, the International Alcohol Policy favours taxes and minimum prices for all alcoholic beverages. This policy is based on a large number of empirical studies on the price elasticity of alcoholic beverages. The purpose of this paper is to ask whether higher taxes on alcoholic beverages can solve the problems caused by excessive alcohol consumption or whether they are largely ineffective while producing other sustained damage at the same time.

The paper evaluates the results of studies on the price elasticity of alcoholic beverages by using the available results of studies on consumer decision making, focusing in particular on the relevance of price elasticity in comparison to the relevance of individually available budgets and prefer ences. In that case the contrast between alcoholics (consumer segment causing alcoholism) and average consumers is analysed using knowledge of the great differences in preferences between consumer segments.

Wine is highly affected by this alcohol policy due to the expectation of a decrease in overall consumption and the very high costs of alcohol content‐related taxes paid by all wine consumers. The price elasticity of demand for wine is analysed to be much higher than for beer and wine consumers are far away from alcoholism.

The big social problem of alcoholism has to be underlined here. This problem and its spread internationally demands an examination of the effectiveness of this alcohol policy on prices and the development of and checks on new instruments for the direct control of alcoholics.

The international alcohol policy is an important field which needs to be analysed scientifically in more depth and in the framework of sustainability, with a focus on harmonizing social, economic and environmental aims. The paper shows that the current instruments used internationally in the alcohol policy cause large economic problems for wine consumers, as well as for wine producers and merchants, without solving the social problems of alcohol‐related hazards and harm.

This study contributes to the scant research on dealcoholised wine from a consumer behaviour perspective by providing insight and reporting on the attributes that South African Generation Y consumers prefer when purchasing dealcoholised wine.

A two-phased research approach was adopted, involving a main quantitative phase, preceded by a qualitative phase. Data were gathered from 626 South African Generation Y respondents by means of a questionnaire. The best–worst scaling method was applied to 13 selected dealcoholised wine attributes, to measure the level of importance of each attribute. To gain more insight on the data, the best-worst scaling scores were further standardised to a probabilistic ratio scale.

“Taste”, “price” and “I have tried it before” were the most important attributes that respondents considered when purchasing dealcoholised wine. Furthermore, “taste” was by far the most important of all the attributes. The attributes of “back label”, “attractive front label” and “brand name” were identified as the least important by the respondents, suggesting that they did not consider the visual elements of a bottle of dealcoholised wine as particularly important in their purchasing decision.

The findings of this pioneering study contribute to the lack of knowledge about dealcoholised wine from a consumer behaviour and marketing perspective, and provide insights and strategies that can be used by stakeholders to enhance the dealcoholised wine market in South Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of information about alcohol content, organic labelling and packaging on consumer preferences and willingness-to-pay (WTP) of non-alcoholic sparkling mock wines.

In a two-step study, the consumer’s expectations and overall liking of two novel brands of mock wines were investigated by focus groups followed by a common hedonic test combined with a choice experiment aimed at measuring consumer WTP. A total of 240 consumers were assigned to two tasting groups of equal size: all were presented at least one brand of mock wine, while drinkers also tasted a familiar brand of low-alcohol sweet sparkling wine. A paper-and-pencil choice experiment followed the tasting sessions.

The results demonstrate that participants in blind or manipulated “informed” conditions are not able to discriminate among mock wines and wine, whereas significant differences in preferences for brands under investigation appeared when labels and other information were disclosed. In effect, drinkers and non-drinkers did not differ in hedonic scores of mock wines. While younger participants exhibited the highest scores in blind liking, the overall expected liking is significantly higher for non-drinkers and women if compared, respectively, to drinkers and men. WTP for mock wines is influenced by taste, glass bottle packaging and the organic label, while mock-wine colour is not relevant.

Although limited in sample size and representativeness, this study has brought some new insights into the consumption of non-alcoholic mock wines. In this study, a significant influence of blind sensory liking on WTP is demonstrated. This result has theoretical implications: while the effect of product information on WTP is well established, the relationship between hedonic scores and WTP – while theoretically consistent – is not so clear-cut in the literature. Further research is needed to confirm/disconfirm these findings.

Sparkling no-alcohol mock wines, despite their sweetness, appear not different in taste to medium-to-low APV (7.5 per cent) sweet wines.

The paper suggests that marketing of mock (no-alcohol) wines needs careful branding to elicit significant hedonic effects, while interacting sensory (blind liking) scores with price information in choice models may help to represent taste heterogeneity in WTP estimates in a better way.

The complexity in determining the quality of a credence good like wine increases due to the lack of mandatory ingredient labeling. This has generated a significant information asymmetry in the wine market, leading consumers to delegate their purchase decisions to expert rankings and wine guides. This paper explores whether expert assessments reduce the information asymmetry caused by the absence of ingredient labeling in the wine market.

By employing analysis of variance (ANOVA) in a sample of 304 wines included in the Wine Guide of the Spanish Consumers Organization (OCU), this paper assesses the extent to which expert assessments based on sensory evaluations converge with the objective cues provided by laboratory analysis in wine quality evaluations.

Results reveal a mismatch between expert assessments and laboratory analyses. Chemical aspects such as SO₂ levels or volatile acidity, sensorial factors such as intensity and persistence, and extrinsic variables such as the region of origin or wine type play an important role in the quality ranking of wines.

These findings call for the inclusion of objective intrinsic cues in expert sensory assessments to provide consumers reliable information about wines and to resolve the apparent dissonances in wine quality assessments.

A visual sweetness scale with an arrow pointing to a specific sweetness level is now required on all labels of AOC Alsace. The sweetness scale makes it easier for consumers to understand what is in the bottle. What is less clear, however, is whether such labeling is always effective. To fill this gap, the current research paper aims to examine the positive and negative effects (double-edged effects) of a visual sweetness scale and identify the boundary condition.

Two studies were conducted using a 2 (cue type: scale vs text) by 2 (consumer type: novices vs experienced wine consumers) between-subjects, quasi-experimental design.

The double-edged effects are only significant among wine novices. Specifically, though wine novices are more likely to purchase wine with a sweetness scale (vs text) due to perceived diagnosticity (Study 1), they are unwilling to pay more due to low perceived quality (Study 2).

The study findings provide practical implications for wine producers, marketers and restaurants regarding when and how to use the sweetness scale on wine labels and wine service.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to reveal the impact of visualizing wine style on wine labels. More importantly, while most previous research demonstrates the positive effects of using visual cues, this research sheds light on its drawbacks and examines the underlying mechanisms.