Linkage Between Moderate Wine Consumption and Well-being: Analysis of Italian Consumers by Regions Over Time

LINKAGE BETWEEN MODERATE WINE CONSUMPTION AND WELL-BEING: ANALYSIS OF ITALIAN CONSUMERS BY REGIONS OVER TIME Introduction: Italy has an old experience in wine production and consumption. Indeed, it is one of the most famous European and worldwide producer together with France and Spain. The country’s share on the world market is 20% and 33% on the European one (Romano & Natilli, 2009). As for wine consumption, it depends on different factors including geographical features (Villanueva et al., 2017). Wine characteristics, consumers’ preferences and consumption habits as well as wine culture vary territorially. The origin of the wine has a crucial importance for consumers’ decisions, sometimes they are willing even to travel for distanced areas with the aim to taste particular products of concrete wine producing regions (Antonazzo et al., 2015). Wine culture of the region somehow defines also consumers’ perception how the consumption of wine affects on their health and wellbeing. For instance, French policies advocate the restriction of wine consumption that indirectly influence on consumers’ perception of negative impact of wine on their health (Vecchio et al., 2017). However, firstly the importance has to be given to consumption frequency. Usually, heavy wine consumers decrease consumption in later years for health purposes (Stockley et al., 2017). Though, wine is a healthy product when it is consumed moderately; its impact on health depends on wine characteristics and attributes as well, whether it is red or white, variety of grapes and other variables (Artero et al., 2015). Aim: The purpose of this work is to investigate and prove the connection among wine consumption, health and well-being. We intend to analyze also how this link varies over time and territory on the example of Italian 21 regions, so to compare these regions in two different years, 2010 and 2017, based on different variables. Methodology: In order to meet the paper objectives, we analyze data of the Italian National Institute of Statistics – ISTAT (2018 a and b) that gathers the statistical surveys. The research is based on the following variables: (1) Moderate wine consumption; (2) Health composite index; (3) Social relationship composite index; (4) Subjective wellbeing composite index. We have used the cluster analysis and a set of statistical unsupervised methods for classifying the units into homogeneous groups. More precisely, we have used fuzzy clustering instead of classical method that does not allow units to belong to more clusters simultaneously. As for cluster validity, we decided to use different cluster validity methods to have different meters of comparison to evaluate our procedure. They are as follows: (1) Xie-Beni index – XBI (Xie & Beni, 1991); (2) the modified partition coefficient – MPC (Dave, 1996) and fuzzy silhouette index – FSIL (Campello and Hruschka, 2006). Results: With regard of the quantity of clusters, all three indices show the same result of three clusters as optimal solution. Nevertheless, they have different consistent of regions in 2010 and 2017 years (fig. 1 a and b). However, it is possible to make comparisons, taking into account for each year the link between the centroids describing the different clusters and the Italian values in the variables considered. In this way, we can characterize the 3 clusters: Cluster 1 as the one with the best values, Cluster 2 as the one with the worst values and Cluster 3 as the one with peculiar values compared to the national data, in both years considered. a – Year 2010 b – Year 2017 Figure 1 – Wine consumption, hedonism style and health: clusters composition; membership degrees; centroids. We can observe the so-called North-South gap, with the Northern and Central Regions with values higher than those of the Southern ones in all indicators (except in the Health composite index, in which the differences are less marked). The moderate wine consumption shows almost similar values in 2010 and 2017. Conclusion: In general, both the 2010 and 2017 analysis in all regions of the country confirm the existence of a relationship between moderate wine consumption and composite indicators of health, social relations and subjective wellbeing. Results showed North-South gap meaning the strong difference between the different areas of the country. In fact, northern and middle regions entered in a Cluster 1, described as having best values while in southern Italy the situation is worse than average of the country so they entered in second Cluster with the worst values. After cluster analysis. It is possible to conclude that the overall situation in the country is improved over time since Cluster 1 increased from 10 to 12 regions with Sardegna and Abruzzo in addition and Cluster 2 decreased from 8 to 5 regions from 2010 to 2017.