Uruguay’s Wine Export Strategies

ABSTRACT

Uruguay entered the wine export market around 2000 when Chile had already established its market share. This article investigates whether Uruguay followed the path of its South American neighbor (Chile) in terms of wine quality improvements and pricing. Using the nonparametric test, we examine whether Uruguayan scores and/or prices shifted closer to Chilean scores and/or prices from vintage year 2000 to vintage year 2015. The results indicate that Uruguayan scores did, but not prices. Uruguayan prices were broadly higher than those of Chile for both years. A likely reason is higher production costs in Uruguay compared with Chile.

KEYWORDS:

• Chile
• Uruguay
• Wilcoxon rank-sum test
• Wine export

Acknowledgments

We thank M. Shanken Communications (Wine Spectator) for permission to use Wine Spectator rating scores and release prices. Also, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.