The price of wine has grown in recent years because of the rise of new producers and markets. This is in line with the distribution of research results in viticulture as well as the field of enology has also changed since this influences the production and consumption of wine. This study studies the changing trends in grape and wine publications in the Web of Science (2002-2017).
Methods and Results
Using bibliometric tools such as the impact of citations, research specialization, and collaboration networks were analyzed. China had the highest annual increase in publications related to wine, Spain had the most significant overall number of wine-related publications, while The USA had the most citation impact. Australia was the sixth most popular publication share and fifth in the percent of citations. European countries work in close collaboration with one another, and Portuguese and Spanish spoken countries form another collaboration cluster. Grape and wine science is a broad subject, with scientists and researchers from food science and technology contributing the most to research, and the majority of funding comes from government agencies.
Conclusions
Collaboration in science does not closely follow the categorizing of nations in Old or New World wine producers. Although the volume of published research on wine was highly correlated with wine production in Old World countries, there wasn’t any correlation with New World countries.
Significance of the Study
This study enhances the search for research in wine and grapes from scholarly research databases. The study also gives an up-to-date report on the global trends in wine research.
Introduction
The global area under vines and the amount of wine produced in 2017 have mostly stayed the same over the last 15 years since 2002. however, the value of exports of wine in US dollars has more than tripled (Anderson and Pinilla 2017.). Wine production is facing new challenges like the effects of global warming (van Leeuwen & Darriet, 2016) and growing competition due to the rise of new markets as well as new producers (e.g., China) (Jenster & Cheng, 2008). Since there is a need for higher-quality wines and more sustainable production methods and processes, more research into the latest innovations in wine and grape production is necessary.
Research in wine science has been the focus of a few recent scientometric studies. One of the earliest studies conducted by Glanzel Veugelers ( 2006) examined publications published between 1991 and 2001. They discovered that the USA was the most prolific in quantity of wine-related articles, closely followed by France, Spain, Italy, and Australia. They also discovered that each country’s share of the number of publications on wine was positively correlated with the percentage of each country’s share in world wine production. A study of wine science between 1992 and 2006 concluded that a change in the research community for wine had been occurring in tandem with the globalization of the industry. Even though the research contribution from emerging nations was lower than their share of the wine market, they accelerated the pace of their international collaborations for study (Cassi and colleagues. 2011).
Other studies have focused on particular countries and found rising wine science developments. For example, South African wine science researchers published 406 research papers in the period 1990-2009, with an impressive amount of international collaboration (Aleixandre-Benavent and colleagues. 2012.); Latin American researchers published 917 articles from 2006 to 2010, accompanied by an increase in cooperation between international partners (Benavent et al. 2013.); Europe and USA collaborated on 498 papers from 1991 to 2010, with an institution like the University of California Davis acting as the central point within the collaborative network (Aleixandre-Benavent and co. 2013.); Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC countries) published 1067 articles between 1993 and 2012, in which China as well as Brazil being the two top most productive nations (Aleixandre et al., 2015). While wine production has increased in Mexico, research in wine science output needs to be done more. Mexican scholars collaborated with mainly advanced countries (36 percent) and rarely collaborated with Latin American nations (7.9%) in their papers (Guillermo and colleagues. 2018).
From 2001 to 2011, there was a rise in research on the health benefits of wine. There was also a significant collaboration between France, Italy, and the USA (Aleixandre & Co., 2013). The research on wine tourism grew from 1994-2014, with 90% of the authors from Anglo-Saxon nations, particularly those from the USA and Australia (Sanchez and others. 2017). A more recent study concentrated on research into grape phenolic compounds and wine (Aleixandre-Tudo & Co., 2019). It concluded that a significant portion of the study focused on the sensory function of phenolic compounds. The authors suggested that future studies could focus on interpreting the astringency or bitterness phenomenon.
Collaboration in wine science earlier than a decade ago was a particular focus. An analysis of collaboration in 1989-2006 demonstrated that common geography and scientific background were crucial factors in international collaboration. As a result, the likelihood of collaboration is higher to occur between countries that share similar histories and traditions in wine production. These are Old World (France et al.) and New World (USA and Australia, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa) (Cassi et al., 2015). Although collaboration with scientists among Old World producers was similar to their trade networks in that they cooperated with wine-producing countries they had trade agreements with, however, concerning New World producers, scientific collaboration networks were essentially different from their trade networks (Cassi and colleagues. 2012).
The literature mentioned above illustrates the changes in the global realm in the production of and consumption (e.g., the development of new producers and markets) and, thus, a growing internationalization of research in this domain (Cassi as well. 2011). There are also shifts in the percentage of different nations in research output, with an increasing share of countries like China is increasing (Zhou as well as Leydesdorff, 2005; Liu et al., 2015). In light of these changes and the reality that there isn’t any comprehensive, current study of the grape and wine scientific output and its impact, the present study will examine the results of research publications in this area between 2002 to 2017 from a variety of perspectives to identify patterns in research, in terms of collaboration, impact, and connection with the production of wine. The study concentrates on research papers dealing with wine and grape science research. There is a link between the production of wine and research in the field of wine, and the rise in the research output from New World producers has been more significant than that of Old World producers. The study also aims to improve the method currently used to retrieve documents related to grapes and wine research from the bibliometric databases.
Method
The research used bibliographic information that spans the period from 2002 to 2017. We selected this time in 2002 because Glanzel and Veugelers’s ( 2006) study covered the period from 2006 to 2001. The goal was to determine whether changes have occurred since. The data was cited items (article letter, notes, as well as a study) taken from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) of Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics). Web of Science (WoS) data is believed to be of higher quality (e.g., the accuracy of classification of journals) in comparison to Scopus (Wang & Waltman, 2016). It does not offer comprehensive coverage of the social sciences and the humanities (Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016). The bias is not a problem for our analysis since we focus on wine and grape research, as opposed to humanities and social sciences studies.
To locate publications on wine science, we followed the methodological approach of (Glanzel and Veugelers). 2006 ) with a few modifications as follows:
- An expression of a topic (below) used to search for the keywords as well as the title and abstract of the published articles (‘TS field of advanced searches) has resulted in finding 35 595 entries. Glanzel and Veugelers ( 2006) created this query based on a series of experiments and has been utilized in most subsequent studies of this area (e.g., Cassi et al. 2011). The topics used for the queries were as the following:
- Grapevingrapevin OR wines OR “wine grape” OR “wine pro*” OR “red wine*” OR white wine*’ OR winemaking OR the word ecology viticulture OR difficult* OR the word enology OR “wine cell” OR “wine yeast” OR the winery OR wineries OR the word vitis.
- The citable items are included in four wine science journals that are indexed within the SCIE database, which consists of The American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, The Australian Journal of Grape and Wine Research, Vitis as well as Vitis and the South African Journal of Enology and Viticulture. We have added the South African journal and Vitis to the list used (Glanzel & Veugelers, 2005). This led to finding 2477 of the records.
- We created a second search query that was topical (below) which was searched using keywords, titles, and abstracts of the published works and resulted in a search of 8512 entries. This query was utilized to enhance the question developed by Glanzel and Veugelers ( 2006). To build the question, wine encyclopedias, and wine-specific databases were consulted, including the Vitis International Variety Catalogue (http://www.vivc.de/) and the Vitis Enology Abstracts (www.vitis-vea.de) published by the Julius Kuhn-Institut, Siebeldingen, Germany. We looked up each of the words in the following query individually and then analyzed the results to confirm they connected to the wine science field. After several tests and refinements, the following list of terms was chosen.
- “aperitif wines*” or ‘Bianchetta Triviana’ or “bottled wine*” or ‘cabernet franc carbonic maceration’ or carignan, or the ‘champagne rose’ or ‘Chenin Blanc’ or dry wine, or ‘fermentation wine* also known as ‘wine fermentation’ “fortified wine*” and Garnacha or gewurztraminer “grape cultivar” and ‘grape maturation’ the icewine ‘Johannesburg riesling or lambrusco’ or malolactic fermentation or malvasia, marshland or merlot or as well as Nebbiolo or ‘pinot blanc or ‘pinot grigio as well as ‘pinot Gris “pinot noir” or “prieto picudo’ or red wine’ or riesling “rioja wine” or ‘rose wine or’sangiovese Semillon, or shiraz wine or sparkling base wine’or’sparkling’ wine*’ or sylvan the syrah grape or the ‘Tannat grape* or tempranillo or vin Jaune or ‘vine physiology as well as ‘vineyard yeast’ winegrape cultivation or winegrowing, or Zinfandel.
- By the Glanzel and Veugelers ( 2006) study, we first found all the publications in which at least one author was associated with an institution dedicated to research in wine using the query address Add = (ENOLOG* OR VITICULT* OR*). This led to an extraction of records totaling 4068. However, after further investigation, it was discovered that 2752 records from 4068 records also were retrieved using any of the three query options described above, and 1316 records were also explicitly retrieved by using the addresses query. Then, we analyzed 1316 records one by one by reading abstracts and titles to determine if they were genuinely related to grapes or the science of wine. Only 176 of these records referred to wine or grape science. This isn’t surprising since researchers affiliated with departments or colleges of enology can also conduct or participate in research that is not directly related to wine, such as within broader fields like microbiology, plant science, and Chemistry. Therefore we have discarded 1140 records retrieved by this query and resorted to those remaining records.
