Wine on the Web

The Internet, in particular the World Wide Web, has rapidly grown since the end of the 90ies. The openness of the Internet has allowed innovative entrepreneurs and engineers to design new applications which rapidly spread into the agricultural- and food industries as into other industries. A promising application is e-commerce, i.e. the trade of goods and services using the Internet. To be able to better understand the likely impact of the Internet on the agricultural- and food industries, e-commerce adoption and uses in the wine industry is studied here. The wine industry was chosen for study because it was identified as an early adopter of e-commerce. Lessons learned from studying the wine industry may therefore provide useful insights to agricultural entrepreneurs, researchers and policy makers with interest and responsibilities outside the wine industry. Australia, California and Germany were chosen as countries for study because of their wine industries are among the World’s largest in terms of production and exports. Also, the countries and the state provide sufficient variation in economic conditions, political and regulatory environments, e-commerce readiness, costs of Internet access, and the size distribution of their wineries. This variation of economic and of other factors was necessary to empirically assess their joint effects on the adoption and use of e-commerce by wineries.