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Sustainable consumption research frequently highlights a gap between consumers’ pro-sustainability attitudes and their everyday purchasing practices. While wine has attracted growing attention as a sustainable product category, existing research has predominantly relied on quantitative approaches, offering limited insight into how consumers themselves interpret and negotiate sustainability in practice. This study adopts a qualitative, exploratory approach to examine how Austrian wine consumers make sense of sustainability in everyday wine consumption contexts. Based on five focus group discussions incorporating a guided wine tasting, the analysis explores meaning-making processes, moral justifications, and situational decision-making rather than attitudes, preferences or willingness to pay alone. The findings reveal that sustainability is not rejected but selectively applied and morally compartmentalized. Wine is frequently constructed as a morally legitimate exception to everyday ethical responsibility, with taste operating as a hegemonic evaluative authority that overrides sustainability considerations. Regional origin functions as a symbolic substitute for sustainability. Meanwhile formal certifications are often met with skepticism, especially when governance structures are perceived as weak. Willingness to pay for sustainable wine emerges as situational and context-dependent, requiring narrative and relational justification rather than abstract ethical commitment. By conceptualizing sustainability as a negotiated and situated practice, this study contributes to sustainable consumption research by moving beyond linear attitude–behavior models. The findings offer insights into eco-friendly living as it is practiced in everyday consumption, highlighting the role of moral boundaries, symbolic cues, and social context in shaping sustainability-related decisions. The research emphasizes everyday consumption practices, key challenges, and situational enablers of eco-friendly living.
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