Brand vs Terroir: an insight of Franciacorta sparkling wines

In the wine sector the dichotomy between brand and terroir is one of the most discussed issue and in the last decades become even more relevant because of the changes in the wine industry and consumption’s habits. Brands are names that consumers have come to associate with a specific value and nature of experience in the marketplace. The strongest ones become synonymous with fulfilling a defined set of expectations, are valued for their identity and people have built emotional relationships with them. But in the world of wine, every individual winery has a brand (or several depending on their portfolio) but although the consumers recognize the name of the company, the choice is driven by different other attributes, including variety, country, vintage, alcohol content, etc. In this sense, the denomination of origin (DO) can be considered one of the attributes of the wine. But at the same time, DO is also a regional or territorial brand, especially in EU traditional producing countries, like France, Italy and Spain, which states the quality of the wine and the collective reputation. At the opposite many large-scale firms competing on international markets and more oriented to the New World, like US, Australia, Argentina, Chile and South Africa, adopet the concept of quality hinges more directly on consumer preferences and is conveyed through industrial brands. The specific product and process standards confer wines belonging to a given DOC/DOCG-specific quality characteristics, substantially differentiate each DOC/DOCG from the others and build the DOC/DOCG collective reputation (Giraud-Héraud et al., 1998) that gives access to a potential premium price on the final market based on consumer willingness to pay for DO wines (Hertzberg and Malorgio, 2008). The alternative ‘brand-based strategy’ for quality differentiation relies on the individual reputation of industrial firms. In nutshell, branded wines are scalable in production and often widely available, typically made from bought-in grapes, with often ‘international’ style and lacking a sense of place and diversity, usually defined by winemaking style and made to a style and to fit a price point, heavily marketed. At the opposite terroir wines are made from grapes grown in one vineyard usually or several neighbouring vineyards owned by the winery or supplied by growers on long-term contracts, in limited production, subject to vintage variation, typically displaying regional influences or a ‘sense of place’ and hugely diverse, sometimes limited in production. Over time, and with enough success, a winery in DO region can begin to trade on its name alone, make a good enough product that people really like, sell it at an attractive price, and scale to meet the demand in the marketplace. The winery becomes a recognized brand. Our paper tries to analyze the performance of a winery in the Franciacorta DOCG region in comparison to the other wineries belonging to the local consortium. We developed a very exploratory study on the consortium and winery data on national and international markets, comparing different products and different distribution channels, over the time (2011-2022).