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The paper has a twofold purpose: (1) to test the application of means-end theory to providers of hospitality goods and services, and (2) to explore this question in the context of winery tasting rooms when they had a unique opportunity to restructure their hospitality experience due to government restrictions in response to COVID.

A qualitative approach was adopted, and a convenience sample was used to conduct semi-structured laddering interviews. Forty interview transcripts were coded as means-end ladders, which were analyzed using a custom computer program to develop the implication matrix and the hierarchical value map.

This paper demonstrates that means-end is a useful approach to investigate the values and behaviors of the producer, specifically hospitality hosts. It finds that the principal goal of tasting rooms is to generate sales, and offering a compelling guest experience is the characteristic that contributes the most to achieving that goal. The staff and the atmosphere created for the guests are the two factors with the greatest influence on the guest experience.

This is the first paper to use means-end theory to study the hospitality host, or the producer of goods and services in general, and the first to study winery hospitality primarily through the lens of means-end theory. The study also helps fill a gap in research on tasting room sales focused on the winery’s goals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the tasting room for wineries from a re‐developing Spanish wine region, and identify the challenges winery owners currently face in their pursuit to market their wines through the tasting room.

Between May and June of 2007 a total of 23 winery owners, managers and wine makers located in the Canary Islands were interviewed from a sample of 61 wineries identified in Tenerife and La Palma islands.

The findings confirm the vital importance of the tasting room as a marketing, branding, and educative vehicle for the wine product. Overall, wineries focus on the tasting room as a way to advertise and present their wines to visitors and passers by as part of a long‐term strategy, rather than as a way to make direct wine sales.

It is acknowledged that the sample of only 23 participating businesses may not be enough to make generalisations about the impact of the tasting room on wineries of the Canary Islands. However, the sample does provide useful insights into the benefits, issues and challenges of the tasting room in this context.

The findings demonstrate the innovative and proactive spirit of winery management, including the push for quality and educating visitors, as key to survival and success in this very competitive industry. In this process, the role of the tasting room becomes critical to achieve those objectives.

The study provides new insights into the role of the tasting room in a Spanish wine region that has received very limited attention. The exploratory nature of this study also provides an avenue for future studies into an industry that is growing around a region's main income magnet: tourism.

There is growing research on the value of winery tasting rooms/cellar doors as an avenue for relationship building with consumers resulting in greater brand loyalty. This paper aims to examine the role of tasting rooms in this regard in an Australasian context.

The research was exploratory, designed to explore a full range of visitors' experiences at the winery tasting room, using a modified form of mystery shopping combined with focus groups.

Establishing brand loyalty through a winery tasting room experience requires more than just good wine or good service quality, rather it results from an experience which is personalised and which establishes an emotional connection between the visitor and the winery, their product and winery staff. Generally smaller wineries were making this emotional connection more effectively than larger wineries. By contrast, staff at small and larger wineries alike were making little effort to establish concrete links to instil brand loyalty with the wine tourist post‐visit by encouraging repeat visitation or promoting their mailing lists or even eliciting wine sales.

The research focused on a relatively small number of consumers in Australia and New Zealand and thus may not be immediately generalisable to other markets.

The research highlights numerous areas for improvement in the organisation of tasting room encounters and the training of staff, noticeably with regards to making lasting connections with visitors resulting in future brand loyalty; issues which could be addressed by winery managers.

The paper gives depth to results previously reported by researchers on the role of service provision at the tasting room to the overall winery experience, and adds perspectives on the effectiveness of efforts to establish brand loyalty and maintain post‐visit contact with the winery visitor.

The purpose of this paper is to study the linkages between customer satisfaction (CS) and sales performance among wineries in New York State's Finger Lakes region.

A survey instrument was used to collect data from visitors to winery tasting rooms in the Finger Lakes. Responses from 457 visitors were collected from nine wineries during the period June 2010 through November 2010. The authors used a factor analysis to identify the primary drivers of CS. Then, the authors modeled the relationship between these drivers and overall CS and assessed the impact of CS on sales, purchase and repurchase intentions.

The authors found five principal drivers of CS: ambience, tasting protocol, service, retail execution, and tasting experience. Of these, ambience and service exerted the most influence on overall CS. Furthermore, as expected, CS significantly influences purchase intentions, the amount of dollars spent and quantity purchased.

The results provide valuable information to winery tasting room managers/owners on measures they can use to improve sales performance. Identifying attributes of the tasting room that generate a positive customer reaction can help winery managers/owners make profit-maximizing decisions.

While the links between CS and sales performance have been established in other product sectors, few studies have focused on a comprehensive assessment of CS and sales performance in wine tasting rooms.

The purpose of this study is to examine the attitudes of Millennial wine consumers and determine if positive evaluations of the winery's web site lead to increased trust in the winery and perceptions of product quality, higher levels of brand equity, and increased purchase intentions. The tasting room experience will be evaluated for consistency with the image created by the web site and the meeting of Millennial expectations during the web site visit.

In total, 122 young people (Millennials) with an average age of 23 were asked to visit winery web sites and then evaluate the web sites for quality and perceptions formed relating to the overall image of the winery and its products. The participants were then asked to visit the winery and evaluate their winery experience and its products.

Web site quality was a significant predictor of increased trust in the winery and perceptions of the quality of the wine. Web site evaluations of brand equity carried over to influence evaluations of brand equity after the tasting room experience. When visiting the winery, the more the customers' expectations were exceeded, the higher the level of customer satisfaction with the tasting room experience.

The research findings were based on a small convenience sample of 122 undergraduate US business students from Northern California. Future research should study larger and more diverse samples of the Millennial consumer.

Wine brands attempting to attract the Millennial customer should consider paying close attention to the design, development, and maintenance of a web site that appeals to the savvy Millennial consumer.

The potential for web sites to impact young adults' perceptions of the winery's image, trust in the winery, perceptions of wine quality, and intentions to visit the winery based on these perceptions has not previously been examined.

The purpose of this study is to compare satisfied and non-satisfied customers in the context of wine tasting rooms using the SERVQUAL model and to examine the relationships in the model in terms of service experience to better understand customer needs.

The data used in this study were derived from a survey conducted among wineries in British Columbia, Canada. Analysis of survey results using the partial least squares structural equation modeling was undertaken. Sample size was 402.

The findings show that the SERVQUAL constructs that had the most impact on customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction were tangibility and assurance. Somewhat surprisingly, the perceived value for money construct was not significantly related to customer satisfaction but was significantly related to repurchase intent. Furthermore, all SERVQUAL constructs, except the reliability construct, were significantly related to customer satisfaction.

This study provides an overview of how wineries can improve their services to increase the number of satisfied customers.

Relying on importance–performance theory, this paper uses a distinctive statistical analysis instrument to investigate the importance and performance of crucial wine tasting room constructs and indicators with a purpose to make real and tangible recommendations for wine tasting room managers to improve the winery visit experience.

The surveys (N = 402) were conducted among 14 wineries in British Columbia, Canada. The data was analysed by using partial least squares structural equation modelling software SmartPLS with importance–performance functionality embedded in it.

The findings indicate the importance and performance of the service quality constructs, assurance, empathy, reliability, responsiveness, and tangibility and their respective indicator variables in importance–performance map analysis (IPMA). The responsiveness construct showed the highest need for improvement in terms of performance of exogenous service quality constructs in wine tasting rooms. Empathy, value for money and reliability constructs got “no change” recommendation and “tangibility” and “education” recommendation. The assurance construct was not significantly related to customer satisfaction and was not included in the IPMA analysis.

The approach provides an easy to use and visual tool for wineries to assess the importance and performance of the various service quality elements. The tool provides the management of wineries guidance for the identification of strategic areas of service quality improvement.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the drivers of customer satisfaction (CS) and sales performance at wineries in the Finger Lakes region of New York State in the context of changes winery tasting rooms implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A survey was administered to tasting room visitors at two wineries in October 2020 in the Finger Lakes region of New York State resulting in 215 usable survey responses measuring customer satisfaction. A factor analysis was used to identify primary factors influencing overall CS. The authors then modeled how these primary factors, along with various demographic factors, influence sales metrics. The results are then compared with previous estimates of such drivers in pre-COVID tasting rooms.

The authors identified four main CS factors: Staff Interactions, Wine Tasting, COVID-19 Precautions and Ambience that play a significant role in overall CS. Of these, Wine Tasting was shown to have a positive influence on total amount spent and the number of bottles purchased, whereas COVID-19 Precautions positively impacted the number of bottles purchased. Overall, CS is also shown to positively impact total amount spent and number of bottles purchased. Customers are shown to prefer some changes to the tasting room due to COVID-19, such as having table service and reservations.

This is the first study researching the influence of certain tasting room changes implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic has had on CS and wine-purchasing decisions in tasting rooms.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate consumers’ wine preferences, recycling attitudes and behaviors and socio-demographic data in an effort to build market segment profiles of those willing to transport wine bottles back to winery tasting rooms to be recycled, interest in standard-weight glass-alternative packaging and, various cork-alternative bottle closures.

A two-stage online survey was administered to 714 wine consumers residing in the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA during two periods in March 2016. Exhaustive chi-square automatic interaction detector (ECHAID) decision tree predictive analysis was used to identify the market segments.

A majority of survey participants were willing to bring empty wine bottles to a winery for recycling (85 percent). Collectively, 77 percent of participants were members of just three of the eight segments developed using a decision tree predictive algorithm, with 90 percent of participants in these segments willing to bring empty wine bottles to a winery tasting room to be recycled. Two segments were comprised of Millennials and Generation X, and the third of Baby Boomers, two having a moderate to extreme interest in natural cork used to seal wine bottles, and similar.

An ECHAID classification tree method was used to develop eight consumer segments. Identifying characteristics that describe consumers likely to return empty wine bottles to a winery benefits recycling efforts and could possibly encourage additional sales.

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact that tasting sheet sensory descriptors have on wine sales in tasting rooms that rely on direct-to-consumer sales to sell the majority of their wines, such as those in New York wine regions.

Nine tasting rooms participated in the study that took place on weekends (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) during a six-week period in July and August 2012. Tasting rooms alternated tasting sheets by weekend, one including sensory descriptors and one omitting sensory descriptors. At the end of each weekend, tasting room managers compiled information on daily wine bottle and (in the case of seven wineries) dollar sales. A multivariate statistical model was created to measure the relationship between the treatment (tasting sheet with or without descriptors) and wine sales, controlling for other variables that could influence wine sales.

The authors found that both bottle and dollar sales were higher when tasting sheets without sensory descriptors were used, with dollar sales statistically significant at the 10 percent level. Other variables that impacted wine sales included the specific tasting room, the day of the weekend, and festivals occurring in the area.

Many tasting rooms, particularly in New York, rely on the tasting room for the majority of wine sales. Determining factors that affect sales can help tasting room managers/owners optimize the tasting room experience for maximized profits.

While there have been studies involving the impact of descriptors on sales of food and wine products, these studies have all taken place in a grocery store or restaurant setting where many different brands and varieties are offered. There has been no research studying the impact of descriptors on wine sales in the tasting room, where tasters have a limited selection and an option to sample products before purchasing. There has also been little research studying aspects of tasting sheets.