In this special episode, we dive into sustainable wine. Our PhD research fellow Rieke Sophie Kohn joins us to talk about her years-long research on the customer perspective on sustainability attributes in wine. In collaboration with Vinmonopolet, she, and we, have conducted a series of ambitious experiments, both in the lab and in the field, to understand how customers respond to sustainability improvements in the wine industry. We start with a bird’s-eye view and discuss the major sustainability challenges facing the wine industry, with climate challenges looming largest. We talk about the crisis in traditional wine-producing countries such as Italy, France, Australia and the United States, and at the same time about how there are “winners” among the countries that can now position themselves as challengers in the industry, such as England and even Norway. Rieke takes us into the world of Norwegian wine producers and draws lines from cider to rhubarb. Lars Jacob talks about experimentation in Romania, Sveinung is not sure whether he has had any wine yet today, and Rieke admits that she comes from a part of Germany where people drink more beer than wine. We then enter the world of Vinmonopolet and talk about the challenges of motivating customers to care about sustainability. Rieke explains the sustainability labelling system and how it led to an ambitious year-long experiment to understand how customers respond to such labelling. We discuss customers’ decision-making processes, whether they actually care enough about sustainability to influence their behaviour, and Lars Jacob encourages some speculation. Sveinung finds a plastic wine bottle in the kitchen, which leads us into a conversation about climate-smart packaging and the pioneering work Vinmonopolet and other alcohol monopolies are doing to promote it in the global wine market. We then dig deeper into Rieke’s other major wine project, in which she conducted a tasting experiment at a wine bar in Bergen (someone has to do the tough jobs). Finally, we discuss the unanswered questions at the end of the PhD, Rieke makes the case for accounting, and we look forward to even more wine research in the road ahead.
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