Escala e qualidade na produção de vinho
: caso dos Vinhos do Dão

  • Luana Sylvie Vincenza Di Rollo (Student)

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

In this dissertation, we intend to answer the following question “Is there any causal relation between the wine production scale and the quality of the production of wine?”. To do so, we performed an investigation focused on the wines that the Comissão Vitivinícola Regional do Dão (CVRD) certified (or not), more specifically, the ones that the desired certification was the Denomination of Origin (DO) Dão, and was requested by the producers between 2010 and 2014. To enable the development of this investigation, in an initial phase, it was necessary an understanding of the functioning of the wine sector to define, with knowledge of cause, the variables that should be used to represent the concepts being studied, production scale and quality of the produced wine. The economic agents that want to certify their wines through CVRD are constrained to a rigorous control of their production facilities (wineries and warehouses), where, among other aspects, it is assessed and measured the capacity of storage of wine and derivatives. We assumed this variable, capacity of storage, as a proxy of the scale of production of each economic agent, that is, DO Dão wine producer. From the analysis of the certification of the wine, we conclude that one of the main stages is the sensorial assessment of the wine batch samples, of which the tasting board of CVRD assigns a rating to each wine batch that is applying to be certified. We assumed this rating as our proxy of the quality of each batch that was submitted to the process of certification. Rapidly, we understood that there could be many factors potentially influencing the quality of wine besides the scale of production. Even though it isn’t the priority of our investigation, we consider relevant to introduce some of these factors into our model and control its impact in the quality of wine to ensure xi that the influence, eventually found in the capacity, is not masked by other effects that weren’t monitored. The other factors are the sub-region of Dão, where the grapes used in the wine production were cultivated, the harvest year of the grapes, the age of the batch at the end of the certification process and the typology of the producer that developed the wine. We resorted to a multivariate linear regression model to obtain quantitative results that provided us an answer to our research question and to help us identify the factors, besides the scale of production that impacted significantly the quality of the produced wine. The obtained results were different for red and white DO Dão wines, the two cases that we studied during our investigation since we had different expectations regarding the impact of the scale in the quality for white and red wine. The main conclusion obtained by solving our linear regression model is that there is a negative relationship between the scale of production and the quality of red wine. Regarding the case of white wine, this relationship was not shown due to the insignificance of the results obtained. One factor that proved to have a significant impact on the red and white wines was the age of the batch that seems to have a positive relation with the explained variable of this investigation.
Date of Award13 Jul 2020
Original languagePortuguese
Awarding Institution
  • Universidade Católica Portuguesa
SupervisorMiguel Sottomayor (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Scale
  • Quality
  • Wine
  • Linear regression
  • Denomination of origin

Designation

  • Mestrado em Economia Empresarial

Cite this

'