The real Burgundy: negotiating wine tourism, relational place and the global countryside

Abstract

Wine tourism is growing in importance in many European wine regions, reflecting broader trends of rural change. The past decade in the Côte d’Or in Burgundy, a traditional and highly-reputed wine region, has seen changing demand from visitors for tourism experiences, and local actors have responded in various ways. Our objective of is to consider those changes and the responses of the wine tourism stakeholders in the context of recent debates regarding rural restructuring in the ‘global countryside’, and specifically the notion of a ‘progressive sense of place’ To address these issues, 26 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders explored their activities, their rationale for involvement, and their level of engagement with the tourism industry. The research engaged with wine and tourism providers as well as public authorities, and investigated the perspectives of French natives and more recent newcomers. The findings expose tensions in their understanding of their place in the world around ‘us’ and the ‘other’ and the need to reflect a long and place-specific history. They also present a distinctive local mindset – a ‘peasant mentality’ which in turn produces contradictions between the need to remain authentic yet become increasingly professional. These varying pressures have not evolved in a uniform fashion but as a response to a series of local and non-local contingencies. The study places these stresses in a particular local context but the findings highlight a wider issue for wine tourism research; regional wine tourism occurs at the nexus of global and place-specific contingencies, meaning substantial spatial, historical, and cultural influences may preclude easy generalisations about wine tourism experiences around the world.