Despite the growing interest of the wine industry in quality and environmental certifications and the influence of these standards on positioning in international markets, scholarly research has paid proportionally limited attention to the link between winery export intensity and the adoption of internationally recognized standards. This study aims to analyze which factors make an organizational model performant, and to verify the impact of the adoption of third-party certifications on the export performance by using the resource-based view (RBV) theory as a theoretical lens. Findings show that younger wineries are more oriented towards the adoption of voluntary quality and environmental certifications, and they achieve the best economic performance, expressed in terms of overall turnover on the market. On the contrary, the better export performance is achieved by the largest group of wineries, which make the greatest effort in promotion and advertising activities and sell their products through intermediaries, while showing a low adoption of certifications. Our results have a number of theoretical and practical implications.