What Influences Five-star Beijing Restaurants in Making Wine Lists?

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the most important strategies for five-star Chinese restaurants when designing their wine lists and how restaurant characteristics influence their strategies. Forty five-star restaurants participated in this research based on snowball sampling. Data were collected by face-to-face interviews. The main part of survey was designed by using the Best-Worst Scaling method. ‘Competitive price fit for the price range of food’, ‘Popular wines’ and ‘Balance of varieties’ are the three most important attributes for restaurants when making wine lists. Some differences emerged between small and large restaurants. The use of Best-Worst Scaling made it easy for the Chinese sample to respond and 40 surveys were enough to find clear differences among the items tested as well as between different types of restaurants. The outcomes show that some Western platitudes, like matching wine to the food, are not relevant for five-star Chinese restaurants in Beijing, and that wine salespeople need to focus on different factors depending on the restaurant.