Consumer preferences for red wine in the Spanish market

Consumers are the core of wine marketing. Identifying their preferences, socioeconomic characteristics and behaviour is a key to designing actions for the wine sector which result in marketing opportunities for wine companies. To answer these questions 800 personal surveys were taken of wine consumers in Madrid and Barcelona. These two cities are characterized as large consumption and business centres and showcases for wine promotion in Spain. The conjoint analysis technique was used to identify wine consumers’ preferences and for their characterization, we used socioeconomic analysis and the identification of their ethnocentric tendencies (CETSCALE). The results show that the most highly-valued elements are price and type of wine, in that order. Consumers prefer wine which offers a good price-quality ratio. The origin of the wine does not seem to be an especially important element although wine consumers from Barcelona present more ethnocentric behaviour than those from Madrid, tending to consume wines produced in their own region.