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Origin related attributes, such as geographical indications, have been largely identified as good proxy indicators of wine quality and are therefore useful tools both for producers and consumers to address information asymmetry. For Argentina, a New World wine producer with an interesting growing pattern in international markets, the understanding of the role of geographical indications is a key issue. Despite the current success of the grape-variety based differentiation strategy, there is an increasing debate on its long-term suitability. Meanwhile, most Argentinean wineries do include non-protected geographical names and vineyard indications on their product label. Through the hedonic pricing methodology we estimated marginal willingness to pay for a wide variety of geographical names present on Argentinean Malbec wine labels sold in foreign markets. New World and Old World markets –well-known classification based on wine production and consumption traditions- have been included in the analysis, in an attempt to provide a comprehensive picture. The United States and the United Kingdom were considered from the former group while the Netherlands and Germany were considered for the latter. For a superior assessment of marginal willingness to pay, analyses were carried out for a Retail data set and an Free on Board data set, which is a novel approach in hedonic pricing. With the former data set we were able to estimate consumers’ willingness to pay for high- to medium-priced Malbec wines sold mostly in specialized shops. The latter data set extended estimates to all price segments sold in the wide diversity of off-trade or on-trade stores, giving insights into intermediates’ marginal willingness to pay. Overall, results indicate that both in New World and Old World countries, consumers are willing to pay for specific origin based wines when buying Argentinean Malbec wine. Differences between countries indicate that their ‘telescopic ability’ to differentiate geographical names and their willingness to pay vary substantially. United States’ consumers are willing to pay a price premium for many different geographical names, located in all the wine producing regions of Argentina. A similar but weaker behavior pattern was observed for English consumers. In the Netherlands and Germany, a reduced number of geographical names are appreciated by consumers and a strong concentration on specific areas was verified. The observed appreciation of vineyard indication -which is not controlled by law but simply defined by the vintner- in all four markets gives further support to conclusions. Both consumers and intermediate buyers are interested in the origin of the product and thus employ available tools to simplify their difficult purchasing decision. The revealed appreciation overcomes the lack of effective national and international protection of Argentinean wine geographical indications. Notwithstanding the importance of possible bilateral or multilateral agreements -for enhancing consumers’ ‘telescopic ability’ to recognize and discriminate among terroir-related wine attributes- the assessment of geographical indications territorial governance indicates a lack of collective management of resources. An actual change in producers’ mentality is required for the implementation of an effective geographical indiactions governance system able to benefit from the revealed appreciation. Adequate investments in human capital will be crucial to effectively implement this substantially new strategic approach based on an appropriate collective management of geographical indication property rights.
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