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The Chinese market represents an increasingly popular destination for wine firms and recent opportunities derive from the growth of e-commerce. The aim of this paper is to understand the impact of digital platforms on wine firms' internationalisation in China by adopting the service ecosystems approach.

The authors carried out a case study of Italian premium wine firms from the Valpolicella area by collecting 27 semi-structured interviews with key informants that operate at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of the internationalisation ecosystem. Italian wine firms were selected as the focus of the analysis, given the recent sales growth of their products in the Chinese market.

Results show that digital platforms hold a key role in the wine firms' internationalisation in China, intervening with resource integration mechanisms, alignment to the cultural context and mediating firms' digital presence in the market. The platformisation dynamics also reveal the existence of enablers and constraints in the firm internationalisation through digital platforms.

The authors aim to contribute to the marketing literature by analysing how digital platforms influence the wine firms' internationalisation in China through an original perspective, i.e. the service ecosystems lens.

The study adopts the service ecosystems approach to understand the internationalisation of wine firms in the Chinese market through digital platforms.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the determinants of export performance literature. The authors investigate the effect of firm characteristics on the Douro region wine firms export performance. The authors consider the Douro region, as it has the Portugal highest wine classification, the appellation d’origine contrôlée and undertakes the first position in the Portuguese wine production and export.

The authors apply a pooling cross-sectional data set that includes 427 observations. The authors pooled two cross sections consisting of 214 and 213 firms for the years 2014 and 215, respectively. The firm export intensity and propensity are the dependent variables. Moreover, the firm size, age and productive efficiency are accounted as the firm characteristics. The authors use the ordinary least squares regression and the tobit and probit models for estimations.

First, size is an influential factor to improve the export performance, and the importance of size is higher for younger firms. Second, there is a positive response from export intensity to age and this response is higher for smaller firms. However, there is a negative response from the export propensity to age and this negative response is higher for bigger firms. Third, there is weak evidence to support a relationship between efficiency and export performance.

This research and the presented results are undoubtedly under some limitations. The main limitation is about the data availability for all characteristics of a firm. For example, it will enrich the result if the authors add some other important variables such as production cost, research and development expenditure and the quality of produced wine by each firm to our analysis.

This research reveals that the influence of firm characteristics on the export performance of Portuguese wine firms is missing in the literature. The results provide a basis to Portuguese wineries to improve their export performance by applying the relevant strategies.

Despite the importance of innovation in and the growth of the wine industry in recent years, empirical research devoted to innovation in this industry remains scarce. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to filling this gap by exploring innovation among Canadian wine firms.

The data used in this paper are drawn from an original firm-level survey conducted between April and July 2018 to study the business and innovation strategies of Canadian winery firms over the 2015–2017 period.

First, the study has identified four innovation modes which are distinct in terms of firms’ strategy, innovation activities, and knowledge sourcing and openness. The second finding is that these different innovation modes are associated with different innovation outputs. The third finding is that there here is a tendency for certain innovation modes to better reflect firms in some regions, although all innovation modes are represented to different degrees in each of the three wine regions.

Empirical research devoted to innovation in this industry remains scarce. This paper contributes to filling this gap by exploring innovation among Canadian wine firms. These firms deal with several challenges and opportunities arising from the production and transformation of cool-climate grapes that impact on business innovation approaches.

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between different kinds of networking and the performance of firms in industry clusters. In particular, it studies the importance of local embeddedness and external openness for product success in two wine clusters in Chile and Italy.

The analysis is based on original firm‐level data. A case‐study methodology is combined with econometric analysis.

The empirical analysis shows that local embeddedness positively influences the development of successful products, but with decreasing returns. More importantly, however, the author finds that external openness is more significant than local embeddedness for explaining firm success.

The paper has implications for managers not working in current “hot spots” who are keen to transform their environments into thriving economies. The author recommends that managers look beyond the local context and establish extra‐cluster linkages with relevant knowledge sources, which may vary from sector to sector. Managers should tap into local knowledge but avoid local over‐embeddedness.

The paper contributes to the understanding of how and whether networks influence the performance of cluster firms.

American wineries have taken marketing steps toward attracting consumers. They employ tasting scores to augment and solidify market share. According to Oster (1999) and Porter (1985), competitive advantage comes from either cost advantages or product differentiation. American wineries use tasting scores they receive from experts as the basis for product differentiation and raising prices. To achieve competitive advantage, the product must be seen as important and an improvement in the market, while simultaneously lacking imitation. This article looks at how tasting scores given by wine experts may affect American firms' competitive advantage, barring entry by importing rivals, such as Australian firms. If these tasting scores provide product importance and improvements, while delivering a product that lacks imitation, competitive advantage may result. If importers to the US realise this, these firms can undermine American advantages, increase competition, and gain market share through their own competitive advantages.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify the main firm-level performance indicators and group them in dimensions that support decision-making in the wine industry.

To achieve this goal, an SLR approach was conducted in the Scopus database from 2009 to 2019. From a set of 607 articles, only 25 studies related to firm-level performance indicators were considered and, following an inductive thematic analysis and an interpretative synthesis, separated into different specific foci that include social, economic and environmental dimensions.

There is a limited number of papers identifying indicators regarding the firm-level performance of wine firms, and even fewer studies including indicators on an integrated approach to measure the different dimensions of firm performance. This paper documents that economic and environmental indicators cover 78.2% of all SLR indicators analyzed. As this group of indicators is limited to a set of sub-dimensions, this paper found that several groups of indicators are misrepresented, such as product portfolio or certifications related to marketing activities and indicators covering purchasing and supply chain activities, which play a crucial role in the competitiveness of the wine industry.

For practitioners, it discloses the most pertinent indicators they need to improve to craft their business strategies. This framework is of added value for policymakers to customize their support programs for specific producers to develop their competitive strategies. It could be deployed in teaching programs as a tool to address the importance of aligning different types of indicators to achieve firm-level performance in the wine industry.

This study contributes to the literature identifying a framework of analysis that includes indicators of four dimensions, namely, economic, social, territorial and environmental. This framework aims to relate performance measures to corporate strategy as a management control tool. The framework intends to improve the fit between firms’ activities and their competitive context and to be flexibly adapted to various products/firms in the wine industry.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm is adopted to explore the most important resources among micro and small firms operating in Italy’s wine industry. Second, the study incorporates a SWOT analysis to examine perceived strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats based on the perceptions of owners and managers of these firms.

An online questionnaire was designed to gather both quantitative and qualitative data from Italian wineries; a total of 211 firms participated in the study.

Product quality, managerial/staff capabilities, knowledge, reputation, service quality and the territory/region emerge as most important resources, clearly aligning with the attributes of the RBV, namely, valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable and (non)substitutable resources. However, based on the RBV, the future-sustained competitive advantage is threatened by, among other factors, the firm’s finances, competition, red tape and the complexity of increasing sales.

Fundamentally, the research contributes to micro and small enterprise literature, and to the limited number of studies that have used the RBV of the firm in the context of micro and small wineries. This theoretical framework is used among wineries of one of the world’s leading wine producing nations. Some dimensions of this country’s wine industry have received limited academic attention. In addition, the study provides practical value in identifying resources, limitations, and threats at a time when micro and small wineries are seeking to develop or increase their international presence.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the sectoral variety and common patterns of innovation in the wine industry. It intends to explore the nature, extent and sources of variety of innovation in the Canadian wineries.

The data employed come from a firm‐level survey addressed to 146 wine establishments in Canada. Results were analysed using factor analysis and non‐parametric statistical analysis.

The results reveal wineries tend to introduce many innovation activities which are internalised or externalised, draw on a variety of different sources of information, with a clear distinction between market sources, government sources (laboratories, research centres) and educational establishments, and introduced different types of innovation, including product and process but also organisational innovation.

The results suggest individual wineries innovate differently, but within a limited number of fairly consistent modes.

There is presently no published research investigating the different modes of innovation with regards to the wine industry and the case of Canada can provide valuable insights to understand how innovation is developed and sustained in cool climate regions.

This paper aims to explore the nature of the cooperation–competition nexus in regional clusters by examining how wine firms in Australia engage in knowledge exchanges about a “common” strategic issue: climate change. Further, it determines if differences in climate change innovations exist based on sub-regional position.

Using a survey, data were collected from 557 firms across three wine-producing regions in Australia. Respondents were drawn from a leading wine industry database.

The findings suggest that, after accounting for all knowledge exchanges, firms across the regions appear to be generally engaging in knowledge exchanges about climate change within their own geographic sub-regions. However, paradoxically, firms in “elite” sub-regions appear to be demonstrating more of a cooperative posture via a greater level of external knowledge exchanges. The results also suggest that implementation rates differ for adaptive climate change innovations only (as opposed to mitigative innovations) to the apparent advantage of firms in elite sub-regions.

The study represents Australian wine regions and should not be taken as a general population sample. The impacts of climate change in other wine-producing regions around the world may vary, leading to different results than those found in this study.

Wine producers face many challenges with respect to climate change. To respond effectively to this issue, the sharing of knowledge is important to innovate around mitigative and adaptive practices. This research suggests that greater stimulation of open knowledge exchanges is likely needed so that all producers can benefit from industry-wide learning.

This paper provides insights to wine scholars, industry practitioners and peak industry bodies seeking to understand and enhance the wine industry’s response to climate change. The paper also points to areas of future research opportunity and provides policy recommendations.

This paper aims to explore the role of eco-innovation in the competitiveness of the Barossa Valley wine region, which is one of the premier wine areas in Australia.

A case study approach using qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews was utilised to gather data from respondents in the wine regional cluster.

The findings suggest that eco-innovation and regional wine clusters contribute to better international performance of wine firms. In addition, environmental issues are important for the wine industry because of the role they play in the global economy.

This study highlights the growing importance of climate change and sustainability on the willingness of wine firms to be involved in eco-innovation. This is crucial for wine firms in the Barossa Valley being globally competitive leaders based on environmental innovations.

Due to the large amount of natural resources that wine firms use, clusters can be used to encourage eco-innovation, which can facilitate further expansion into new international markets. This is important because of consumers increasing emphasis on environmentally friendly food products and the government priority given to eco-innovations.

This paper provides insights into the eco-innovation process that can help wine firms, industry practitioners and regional planners develop better environmental strategies that lead to increased global competitiveness.