Robert Joseph argues that wine buying is unusually stressful because it combines several psychological effects that discourage purchasing: loss aversion, choice overload and the desire to make decisions quickly. He cites behavioural research showing that too much choice becomes particularly problematic when products are difficult to compare, have many attributes, the buyer feels time or social pressure, and the buyer cannot clearly describe what they want. Wine fits these conditions almost perfectly. Shoppers face hundreds of bottles, unfamiliar regions and producers, different vintages and grapes, complicated labels and relatively small price differences. The result can be hesitation, lower confidence, regret or simply choosing by an easy proxy such as price or a critic’s score. Joseph argues that this helps explain why wine has struggled more than categories such as beer, spirits and ready-to-drink products. He notes that global wine volumes fell 21% in the decade to 2024.
His broader point is that the wine industry often assumes consumers enjoy exploring all this complexity, when that is much more characteristic of wine professionals and enthusiasts than ordinary drinkers. The implication is that retailers can make wine easier and more profitable to buy by reducing the mental effort and perceived risk involved rather than simply offering more bottles or more immediate information.
My website statistics show that many people arrive on my site after searching for information about a specific wine, mostly on mobile. Some will be researching before they buy, but others will already be in the shop, have seen a wine they do not know, and will look it up on their phone before deciding whether to buy it. That is why I think the more mentions, reviews and useful information there are about individual wines, the better. Online content can influence the customer both before they enter the store and at the precise moment they are standing in front of the bottle trying to decide whether it is worth taking a chance on.
