Wine Tourism in Italy: New Profiles, Styles of Consumption, Ways of Touring

Italy has always been a wine country: it produces 20% of the world and 33% of the European wine production; in 2008 it has produced more wine grapes than France. More, Italy is also a country with an ancient tradition in tourism. But there are weakness in these sectors: Italy is, among the big touristic countries, the one with the more fragmented accommodation capacity; in the last 20 years it moved from the fourth to the fifth place as tourism destination, according to the World Tourism rankings. The wine tourism is still at beginning and there is lack of data and information about it. Starting from this situation, the aim of this paper is to present a new approach to study wine tourism, explaining the proposed methodology trough the data collected in surveys on tourism and wine tourism in Italy, with a focus on Tuscany. Data used are along to the topic, starting from Italian situation where there is a strong connection among wine, food, territory, art and culture, considering both potential and real wine tourist. Analyzing data of Italian and foreigners tourists we demonstrate that in Italy wine tourism is not a niche tourism, but it is a subset of the same travel, with a strong evidence of a mix of tourisms. Results obtained in several field researches are exposed to show how studying attitudes and values of tourists, but also their mobility on a territory, could give new perspectives for promoting wine events in Italy; furthermore, differences between Italian and foreigners tourists are taken into account.