Old World Wines Revisited: Consumers' Valuation of Spanish and German Wines in the UK Wine Market

Abstract

The mid 1990s was a pivotal period for the UK retail wine market, as New World Wines started to expand significantly at the expense of Old World Wines. This paper reviews supply and demand-side characteristics of the UK wine market during this period, and the underlying wine labeling scheme, before assessing how wines from Old World wine producing countries were valued by consumers in the British wine market. Following a more detailed discussion of econometric estimation issues, hedonic price analysis is applied in order to analyze consumers’ valuation of wine label attributes of Spanish and German wines sold in Britain in 1994.