CHARACTERISTICS of an ENGAGING VIRTUAL WINE TASTING

Wine tasting rooms in the United States play an important role wine industry and economic vitality of regions that tourists visit, as are generally well-educated affluent, they eagerly buy when experience “pleasure” with their tourism (Bruwer & Rueger-Muck, 2019). When COVID-19 pandemic forced many winery to shut down for months operate under severe constraints once allowed reopen, wineries turned virtual tastings stay engaged consumers attract new ones. This paper is exploratory study features a participants U.S. find most engaging. We adopted concept hedonic framework our apply experiential view first applied by Bruwer Alant (2009) create online survey employing Best – Worst methodology published Finn Louviere (1992). collected 261 valid responses from people who participated at least one tasting. Using classic agglomerative method, we performed unsupervised clustering on raw response data identify five main clusters participant segments.