Winery and wine exhibition visitors' characteristics in the context of wine tourism development

Wine tourists are a very heterogeneous segment of consumers with diverse socio demographic, psychographic features and different behaviour towards wine as a product and wine tourism as a selective form of tourism. This paper analyses the influence of socio-demographic features and the behaviour of wine tourists in Croatia. The survey showed that more winery visitors prefer dry wines compared to wine exhibition visitors. In both samples they spend up to (sic) 20 per month, drink mostly dry white wines in 0.75 1 bottles. Men and higher educated persons were the majority in both samples. Wine exhibition visitors were a bit younger than winery visitors. Winery visitors spend more money on wine and showed fewer preferences toward dry wines compared to wine exhibition visitors which are more likely to drink wine in places other than home or restaurant. Wine tourism in Istria should hold to existing wine roads and wine quality enhancing the numbers of visitors and volume of sales by implementing new attractive activities and events and by involving cultural, historical and natural resources in the wine destination in Istria.