Wine list analysis and restaurant popularity : an exploratory study in the city of Bergamo /The STAR WARS of Michelin Guide restaurants from a Wine List perspective : a case study from North-West Italy

Wine lists are a fundamental part of high-class restaurants. Nevertheless, how a good wine list can influence the rating of restaurants that are not top classified? The role of how the wine list is structured and how are distributed the prices of wines, however, have not yet considered. The manners to classify and rate restaurants twofold. There are official channels, where the most famous example is the Michelin restaurant guide, and there are plenty of websites that collect customer options on restaurants: TripAdvisor, Googlemaps, TheFork, Yelp, just to mention few of them. Using data from TripAdvisor, a study aiming to evaluate the impact of the features of a wine list on the rating of restaurants, has been conducted on the city of Bergamo to fill this gap about the function of wine lists on restaurant ratings increase. A number of models were specified to assess the impact of wine lists feature on the restaurant's ratings. The results indicated a significant negative impact of the average wine price, the coefficient of wine price variation, and the price range, and a negative impact of high price level. Showing that high ratings are not influenced by high price wines in general, placing luxury wines into a niche. The heterogeneity of the wine lists had a positive for regional variety and negative for typology variety, both not significant, influence on the restaurant's rating. These results are helpful for restaurant managers and in general for the restauration-retail system, such as a food franchising, it provides a setting guide to the wine lists composer in order to appear better evaluated on reviews-based websites.