Wine drinkers trust merchants over bloggers

Written by Richard Siddle

Friday, 28 January 2011 15:06

Independent bloggers are one of the least trusted sources for wine information in the UK, USA and France, according to research published by the Wine Intelligence.

The report finds that 50% of wine consumers trust the advice given over the counter by a wine merchant, compared to one in five who trust what independent bloggers have to say about a wine.

In the US, wine merchants are even more revered, with 80% of consumers surveyed saying they trust wine merchants.

In France only 10% of wine drinkers seeing independent bloggers as a trusted source.

The internet, however, is seen as a trusted medium for information about wine. Some two thirds of the US regular wine drinkers surveyed now look for wine information online, with one in three using social media as a source.

The UK and France are a little less wine active online, with just under half the wine drinking populations in these countries using the Internet for wine information and 16% using social media.

In the UK supermarket websites are seen as the most popular online source about wine, whilst in France consumers prefer to go to branded websites.

In the US it is websites run by wine shops, newspapers and smaller wine producers that are the most used online sources, with supermarket websites ranking below Facebook.

Jean-Philippe Perrouty, research director at Wine Intelligence, said: "We have known for some time that consumers trust people closest to them for recommendations about wine. This data shows the power of the internet as a way of leveraging this trust as the consumer's search for wine knowledge moves online.

"It looks as if the trust levels built up over time by local wine merchants are transferring into the growing power of the Internet, while word-of-mouth recommendations are also migrating into the Facebook era. Clearly bloggers will have a role to play in this new world, but this research shows how important it is to build up trust levels among your audience."

* Wine Intelligence's The Internet and Social Media report series is available at £1,300. Findings are based on the November wave of Vinitrac® - the Wine Intelligence global on-line survey of wine drinkers.

Comments

#6 1WineDude 2011-02-03 13:10

What I find almost unbelievable is that the findings actually support growing influence of wine blogs in the UK but this fact is being ignored and/or twisted by the report and by its subsequent coverage.

Essentially, 1 in 5 people in te UK trust wine blogs for info. according to this report. So instead of saying that ONLY 20% of the UK market in potentially influenced by bloggers, why are they ignoring the storyline that bloggers have "captured" 20% of the UK wine market in terms of influence, in what amounts to record time (probably less than 5 years)?

I don't get it, apart from sensationalism trying to draw eyeballs and GBP. But if that's the case, then anyone spending $2K on that report is wasting their money (my advice: invest it in blog, twitter, and FB page design!).

#5 Katie Pizzuto 2011-02-02 14:30

To what David said I would add that it would be helpful to know if the consumers polled are the type to bother with wine blogs at all to begin with. My gut tells me that readers who frequent wine blogs DO trust their reviews, whereas someone like my mother who never goes near a wine blog (other than mine) has no reason or desire to trust a blogger over her local store clerk.

#4 David Honig 2011-02-01 15:16

The poll does not really measure anything but familiarity. The poll would provide more information if it compared the customer's regular wine store with the same buyer's favorite wine blogs. There are certainly bad wine blogs, just as there are bad wine stores, but the customer's view of stores is self-selecting, limited to those they choose to frequent, while "wine blogs" includes every site on the web, from the best sites that carefully select and edit their stories to the most basic blather.

#3 margaret 2011-01-31 19:18

very interesting article - were the participants who were surveyed broken down by age group in this study?

#2 The Sediment Blog 2011-01-30 18:52

Well, I'm not sure I would trust what we have to say...

#1 Robert Giorgione 2011-01-29 12:42

Very interesting article.

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