CHARACTERISTICS of an ENGAGING VIRTUAL WINE TASTING

Wine tasting rooms in the United States play an important role in the wine industry and the economic vitality of the regions that wine tourists visit, as wine tourists are generally well-educated and affluent, and they eagerly buy wine when they experience “pleasure” with their wine tourism experience (Bruwer & Rueger-Muck, 2019). When the COVID-19 pandemic forced many winery tasting rooms to shut down for months and operate under severe constraints once allowed to reopen, many wineries turned to virtual wine tastings to stay engaged with their consumers and attract new ones. This paper is an exploratory study of the features of a virtual wine tasting that participants in the U.S. find most engaging. We adopted the concept of winery tourism as a hedonic experience as the framework for our study of virtual wine tastings and apply the experiential view first applied to wine tourism by Bruwer and Alant (2009) to create an online survey employing the Best – Worst methodology first published by Finn and Louviere (1992). We collected 261 valid responses from people in the U.S. who participated in at least one virtual wine tasting. Using the classic agglomerative method, we performed unsupervised clustering on the raw survey response data to identify five main clusters of virtual wine tasting participant segments.