Marieshka Barton Wines of Spain Prof. Newton June 15, 2015

Spanish Wine Marketing and Sales Sonoma State University’s Wines of Spain 2015 summer class introduced students to Northern Spain’s prestigious Penedès, Priorat, and Rioja wine regions. Production and marketing professionals from eight wineries hosted our student group and provided facility tours and insights on production, marketing, and exporting. This paper focuses on Northern Spain’s wine industry’s legal regulations, tourism, stewardship, communications, and exports through the lens of wine business marketing. The paper concludes with marketing recommendations relevant to new …show more content…

Legal Regulations Based on France’s appellation system, Spain implemented its Denomination of Origin (DO) system, delaminating unique arigultrual regions, in 1932. The DO adheres to EU’s strict quality standards, which regulates irrigation, yield, varietals, and winemaking practices such as blending, aging, and bottling among others. Wines must be submitted to a regulatory tasting panel that evaluates color, aroma, taste, and texture. Wines are then sent to a laboratory for further analysis on tannins, acids, and sugars characteristic of the region. If approved, wineries may put the DO’s place name on the label (Meloni and Swinnen, 2013). As of 2015, Spain has 62 DO’s, two consistently superior DOCa regions, La Rioja and Priorat as well as three consistently superior private estates, Vinos de Pago (Rubio, 2010). Marketing the DO Strict appellation regulations stifle product innovation, yet they also collectively market a region’s wines by ensuring quality standards thus adding value and garnering customer trust. Traditionally, old world consumers prefer appellation wines as guaranteed products of regional style, quality taste, and health standards. EU wine labels indicate, not only the style, but also the standard of production: pesticides, blends, sugar, water, concentrating agents, strain of yeast etc. Furthermore, DOs represent more than quality