Delivering appealing and competitive rural wine tourism experiences

Abstract

Wine tourism is a niche market within rural tourism. It seeks to sell more wine, and to help sustain the wider rural economy. This chapter explains why rural wine tourism is growing, and why its businesses find diversifying from growing vines and producing wine into the very different business of tourism to be difficult, especially to addressing visitors’ needs for experiences. The wine tourism market and its many segments are analysed, including the importance of visitors interested in the ‘terroir’, the wine growing land, its communities, and landscapes, as well as of those mainly interested in wine itself. Key issues involved in researching, creating and marketing appealing experiences are discussed, including the importance of wine routes, corridors and networks. The need for partnerships between wine growers and tourism interests is stressed, as is that of effective governance stemming from those partnerships to create more viable destinations. The internet’s growing role in researching and marketing wine tourism, rural tourism generally and assisting the creation and use of new and market-appealing experiences is discussed. Co-creation of new and improved experiences is shown to be important. Experience creation and use is suggested as having wider relevance to supporting more sustainable forms of tourism, leading to visitor behavioural change, longer visitor stays, supporting the concept of slow tourism, and reducing emissions.