Drivers and Barriers of Wine Consumption Among Predominantly Young, Highly Educated Chinese Consumers: A Sociodemographic and Network Analysis

Understanding the drivers and barriers of wine consumption is of substantial importance for both market development and sensory science research, and this is particularly salient in rapidly changing non-Western markets. Young, highly educated Chinese consumers represent one of the fastest-growing segments in the global wine market, yet large-scale studies of their consumption preferences and rejection patterns remain limited. This study aimed to characterize the conditional dependence structure of wine-consumption behavior in this population and to examine the associations between common consumption barriers and sociodemographic variables. A nationwide cross-sectional online survey collected 4823 valid responses. Non-parametric tests were used to compare sociodemographic groups, and a regularized Gaussian graphical model (GGM) was estimated to characterize the conditional associations among 15 consumption-behavior variables. The sample was dominated by young respondents (18–24 years) and individuals with higher education. The three most frequently endorsed barriers were taste aversion (51.1%), price sensitivity (38.7%), and lack of knowledge (19.6%). Age and education were the most central sociodemographic variables in the network. The knowledge barrier showed a moderate negative conditional association with education (partial r ≈ −0.171), whereas taste aversion—although the most frequently endorsed barrier—did not show clear conditional associations with sociodemographic variables in the network. Gender was not conditionally associated with any other variable in the network. These observations suggest that the three consumption barriers may operate through different network pathways and may therefore have different implications for intervention design, a possibility that warrants further confirmatory and longitudinal research.