Success and failure of visits to winery tasting rooms

There have been a number of recent reports about problems getting visitors to come to winery tasting rooms (cellar doors), at least in the numbers that they were in before the Pandemic (e.g. Tasting room visitation is down). I have wondered: is this a bad thing, or not? After all during the Pandemic, because wine enthusiasts weren’t allowed to travel, many wineries went to them, instead, online (How Sonoma County wineries are navigating a post-pandemic tourism world). This makes for a different direct-to-customer future, but not necessarily a worse one. *

Mind you, I do like visiting wineries. So, these thoughts have prompted me to wonder about the quality of the winery-visiting experience before the Pandemic. One potential source of such information is the user reports compiled by the travel-planning site TripAdvisor. To this end, a report in 2022 used this source to examine: What went right and what went wrong in my cellar door visit? Here, I will look at some of the conclusions from this report.

The authors were interested in what they call Service Quality (SQ), which derives from comparing perceived expectations (E) of the service to perceived performance of that service (P), so that SQ = P—E. That is, Service Failure is defined as service performance falling short of customer expectations.

To look at this quantitatively, the authors note that:

According to the rankings on the TripAdvisor platform, based on the number of reviews, the top five wine destinations in the world are: Tuscany (Italy), followed by Napa Valley (the USA), Hunter Valley (Australia), Stellenbosch (South Africa), and Mendoza (Argentina).

So, these are the five regions that the authors studied, using what they describe as a combination of “sentiment analysis” and “natural language processing”, as applied to 89,672 TripAdvisor reviews (from Jan 2010 to Apr 2021). ** Their analysis divided these into Positive reviews and Neutral/Negative reviews, which allowed the authors to identify what they perceive as both the Service Quality components and the Service Failure components. The review comments associated with these two groups turned out to be:

Service Quality:
wonderful tasting experience
knowledgeable friendly staff
interesting informative tour guide
good / nice wine
small family winery

Service Failure:
rude people / staff
worst winery tour
poor customer service
bad / terrible experience
disappointing visit

From this analysis, the authors concluded that: “the issues most linked to service quality and service failure are as follows (in order of importance):

the quality of the main wine product,
the experience in the tasting room,
the organized tours,
the empathy of the staff,
the reliability of the staff, and
the setting of the cellar and landscape.”

So, now you all know what to focus on when visiting a winery (or when people visit your winery).

The authors also noted that these themes were common to all five wine-tourism regions. However, there was also some notable difference between the regions, if we look at the final (overall) scores assigned for Service Quality versus Service Failure. These are shown in the above graph, where each point represents one of the regions, mapped with its Quality score horizontally and its Failure score vertically (which is negative, of course).

As you can see, four of the regions follow a simple pattern of inverse relationship between Quality and Failure (shown by the red line) — Quality declines as Failure increases. On the other hand, the Napa Valley, has the least Service Failure score while still not doing all that well on the Service Quality score (ie. second last) — there is some disconnect here between Quality and Failure, which would be worth exploring further.

However, in all five cases the Quality scores are greater than the Failure scores, which is what we want to see in the wine industry. Unfortunately, the authors do also note that customers are more likely to remember service failures than remember excellent service.

Regarding differences between the regions, the authors note that: “Tuscany, and especially Stellenbosch, are characterized by the complementarity between wine and food, and Mendoza, Napa Valley, and Hunter Valley by the presence of organized tours.”

There is nothing necessarily negative here, even in the failure aspects. After all, it should simply “remind us that our greatest lessons are those learned from failure, and that sometimes these lessons are hard won” (quoted from: How engineers learn from failure). So long as we are always trying to do better, then we will learn from both success and failure (for a hint on success, check out: The best thing you can do to prepare tasting room staff for the busy summer season).

Personally, I have enjoyed every one of my winery visits, to one extent or another, whether in Australia, the USA, or Europe. This has enriched my life, obviously!

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* This in addition to the environmental factors that affect winery visitation, from time to time (e.g. NSW wineries at breaking point from decimated crops, declining tourism after floods), as well as the effects of Climate Change (e.g. Queensland's wine industry calls for stronger action on climate change after horror season of hail, flood and fire).

** I have used TripAdvisor a lot in the past, when my wife and I travel, and so I am well aware of its limitations, and especially its biases. So, the data here do need to be interpreted carefully.