The ‘sense of terroir’ among wine-consuming social media users in Italy

The purpose of this study is to explore wine consumer appreciation towards terroir-based communication in the social media context. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach was applied to elicit consumer preferences for alternative Instagram posts including image-based and text-based signals about wine terroir. An online survey was administered to a sample of Italian wine consumers who use social media. Results showed that image-based posts were largely preferred to text-based posts. Among image posts, the visual appearance of the grape variety and the natural label, which means a combination of an intrinsic cue with an extrinsic one, gains higher user attention in comparison with the other signals. Among text posts, posts proposing a ‘terroir association’ received higher priority than those explaining a ‘terroir concept’. These results were tested analysing real Instagram posts of an Italian winery. The number of likes received by the different terroir-related posts reflected the AHP-estimated global priority weights highlighting that actual consumer appreciation agreed with the evaluation determined by using the proposed AHP model. The study revealed that the AHP was a useful approach to evaluate wine consumer engagement with digital communication. It contributed to understanding how wineries can effectively convey wine terroir meanings via social media.