Women Pay More for Wine Made by Female Winemakers - When Labels Say So

The wine industry has long been dominated by men - in the vineyard, in the cellar, and on the label. Women winemakers produce a significant share of the wines sold in the United States, but they are far less likely than their male counterparts to advertise their gender on the bottle. A new study suggests that reluctance may be costing them sales.

Research from Washington State University and Auburn University, published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management, finds that disclosing female winemaker identity on labels significantly increases women's intentions to purchase wine and their stated willingness to pay a premium price. The effect is amplified when the label's visual design reinforces the message with feminine cues such as floral imagery. Women who responded to both the written disclosure and the visual cues showed the strongest purchasing intentions and the highest price tolerance.

Why This Is a Business Question, Not Just a Social One

Women account for 59% of all wine purchases in the United States. That market share makes the purchasing preferences and decision-making processes of women wine buyers a commercially significant question. If a labeling strategy that costs little to implement - simply stating "made by a female winemaker" - shifts purchasing behavior among the largest consumer segment, the implications for wineries are direct.

"Our findings suggest that women winemakers and winery owners can benefit by being more visible," said Christina Chi, coauthor of the research and professor of hospitality business management at WSU's Carson College of Business. "The research shows that they can disclose their ownership with confidence and leverage it as a marketing strategy."

The study builds on earlier work, published in 2024 by Chi, co-author Ruiying Cai, Demi Deng, and WSU Emeritus Professor Robert Harrington, which showed that feminine visual cues on wine labels - independently of any explicit gender disclosure - increased women's purchasing inclinations. The new research adds winemaker identity disclosure to the analysis, finding that the two effects compound: explicit text about female authorship combined with feminine visual design produces stronger responses than either element alone.

Why Women Winemakers Often Hide Their Identity

The study documents a paradox: women winemakers hold back information that, according to the evidence, would increase their sales. The explanation the researchers offer is strategic: in a male-dominated industry, women winemakers may reasonably worry that gender disclosure will invite prejudice - that consumers will assume female-made wines are inferior, or that buyers will view gender-based marketing as a gimmick rather than a mark of quality.

This concern is not unfounded. Research on gender stereotyping in food and beverage markets has documented bias against products associated with non-dominant gender identities in specific product categories. Wine, with its strong associations with expertise, tradition, and connoisseurship, is a category where perceived authority matters and where gender bias in expert evaluation has been documented in other contexts.

But the study's findings suggest that the anticipated backlash, at least among the largest consumer segment, may not materialize - or may be outweighed by the positive signal that female winemaker identity sends to women buyers. Among women, who make up well over half of wine consumers, the researchers found no evidence that gender disclosure reduced purchasing intent. The direction of the effect was consistently positive.

Study Design and Its Limits

The research used experimental methods - presenting participants with wine labels featuring different combinations of gender disclosure language and visual cues, then measuring stated purchase intent and willingness to pay. This approach allows clean causal inference about the effect of labeling on stated preferences, but it has limitations.

Stated willingness to pay and stated purchase intent do not always translate directly to actual purchasing behavior. In a real retail environment, factors including price comparison with competing products, shelf placement, retailer recommendations, and prior brand familiarity all influence decisions in ways that laboratory or survey-based experiments cannot fully capture.

The research does not examine responses among male consumers, who represent 41% of US wine purchasers. Whether female winemaker disclosure is neutral, negative, or positive among male buyers remains an open question for this research team, though the commercial priority given 59% female market share is clear.

The practical implication the researchers draw is specific: labels can say "proudly made by a woman winemaker," retail displays can feature women-made wines as a category, and winemaker identity can be part of brand storytelling rather than something to obscure. For an industry segment that has historically underinvested in marketing gender identity as an asset, the research offers a data-backed reason to reconsider that caution.