You swish around a sip of organic wine in your mouth and it might tempt your taste buds, but that doesn’t mean you’ll pay more for it. Cathy Isom tells us wine lovers aren’t willing to pay more for that bottle, even if it’s labeled organic. That’s coming up on This Land of Ours.
Organic agriculture around the world continues to expand. And consumers are spending more and more these days just to get their hands on specific organic labeled foods. But when it comes to wine, that’s not the case. That’s according to a new University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences study, recently published in the journal Food Policy. It shows wine is one product consumers aren’t willing to pay more for even if it bears the organic labeling. Only about 16 percent of wine consumers 
purchase organic wine. The grad student leading the research specifically examined wine consumed from the Tuscany region of Italy. But the student’s adviser said the research findings likely apply to any organically produced wine.
For the study, researchers collected prices paid for different bottles of wine through online retailers. They also compared various wine characteristics to get the price effect of organic certification and labeling. Data was collected from more than 400 premium red wines from 50 wineries in Italy and sold to Italian and American consumers. 31 percent of the wines used were organic; about 42 percent of those are certified as organic, and of the certified organic wines, about 24 percent are labeled as organic. Either way, the study did show consumers just aren’t spending more for organic label.
I’m Cathy Isom…
Read more about the UF/IFAS study.
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