COMPANIES' PERFORMANCE AND THE GREEN ECONOMY IN THE WINE SECTOR

The wine sector is one of the most representative of both Italy and other foreign countries thanks to the richness of fine wines and a combination of know-how, craftsmanship and traditions held by Italian producers. Therefore, the wine sector represents a key factor for attracting tourism, due to a wine tourism phenomenon which involves both a niche of experts persons and tourists in general. Our research goals are twofold. The first is to examine the impact of wine consumption trend on Italian and foreign wine companies in terms of economic performance. The second goal is to identify the most relevant green concepts for the wine industry with regard to addressing environmental challenges. We formulated two research hypotheses correlated to the above goals. The objective of the research was identified through an analysis of the national and international literature on the research topic. In addition, a quantitative and qualitative survey was conducted in order to achieved to research objectives. It emerged that Italian wine consumption trend negatively impacted on core business performance, while not on the return on equity; despite the world consumption crisis, global wine consumption is kept to a similar extent in pre-crisis period and foreign companies in the sample have obtained an increase in economic performance. In addition, the tendency towards a green economy is also involving the wine sector, due to companies' susceptibility to a greater focus on the environment. The implications of this study are related to the potential of the wine sector in Italy and in other foreign countries. This sector represents an interesting field of action for related companies in terms of turnover and profitability. In order to overcome the limitations of the present research, it would be interesting to compare the potential and dynamics of wine consumption on performance with that of other economic sectors, which are also representative of a country economy. Furthermore, some suitable econometric models would be usefull to carry out a simulation on the impact of a series of external and internal variables of the wine market on the performance.