Segmenting the Greek wine tourism market using a motivational approach.

When wine tourism is approached as a form of consumer behavior, a part of re search focuses on the demand side, exploring the consumers who travel to wine regions. Key researchers have commented that there is no stereotypical ‘wine tourist’; however, some distinctive features regarding profiling and segmentation can be drawn from literature. The objective of this paper is to address these issues as well as to provide an insight into the winery visitor in Greece. A quantitative approach was employed and 133 visitors to 13 wineries of the ‘Wine Roads of Northern Greece ’ were surveyed through the use of a structured questionnaire. Accordingly, in order to identify their profile, descriptive analysis was carried out and specific demographic, socio-economic, and other behaviour characteristics were assessed. Analysis suggests that the winery visitor in North ern Greece is predominately a young male, well educated, with a high income and comes from urban centres in close proximity to the wine region. Furthermore, Two-step Cluster Analysis was performed on the basis of the wine tourists’ motivations for visiting the wine region. Four exclusive groups were generated: (i) the ‘Wine lovers’; (ii) the ‘Neophytes’; (iii) the ‘Occasional visi tors’ and (iv) the ‘Hangers-on’.