1/07 WINE BUSINESS

N E W S A N A LY S I S

WINE TOURISM
As the film Sideways revealed in 2004, wine tourism is big business in California.
In France and many other regions, however, the notion of visiting wineries for fun
is still in its infancy, obser ves Robert Joseph.
s Frances wine industry slowly
begins to acknowledge the frightening reality of the challenges
it now faces from the New World
and from some of its own more dynamic
European neighbours, a recently-coined
word is increasingly falling from the
lips of Gallic winemakers: Oenotourisme
or wine tourism or agritourism.
I first became interested in this subject
in 2000 when I was invited to address a
Wine Tourism conference in 2000 in
Sydney. The research I did for that presentation left me feeling distinctly less
convinced about a rapidly growing international desire to visit wineries than
most of the other speakers, who generally
agreed that wine tourism was The Next
Big Thing. I explained that poor response
had forced Kuoni, one of the biggest travel
companies in the world to cancel plans to
launch a set of wine tours. I also revealed
the disappointing visitor figures at the
then just opened Vinopolis wine
museum and theme venue in London and
the statistic I had been given by a Hunter
Valley tour operator that the average visitor
to the region wanted to see no more than
one-and-a-half wineries. Global sales of
wine books and magazines had slowed and
television schedulers had little enthusiasm
for wine programmes. In simple terms,
there didnt seem to be much evidence of
growing consumer enthusiasm for wine
as anything beyond a beverage.
More recently, however, I have found
myself taking another, closer look at
the business of wine tourism while
preparing the Wine Travel Guide to the
World, a book which was released by
www.footprintpublishing.co.uk at the
end of 2006. What I discovered was a
far more complex picture than Id perceived
six years earlier - and some fascinating
philosophical differences between regions
and countries. For some producers,

tourism is, as my fellow speakers in

Sydney predicted, now indeed a serious
and, in some cases, essential part of their
business. For others, in areas like
Bordeaux, it remains a novelty.

Boom in California
According to a report prepared by
Barbara Insel of MKF Research for the
California Association of Winegrape
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Wine Tourism by country

Visitors
California

20m

France

7m

Italy

9m

Spain

6m

Australia

5m

South Africa

2.5m

New Zealand

0.4m

SOURCE: WINE BUSINESS INTERNATIONAL, 2007

MARQUES DE RISCAL CITY OF WINE

Growers and the Wine Institute of

California in 2005, nearly 20 million people
visited wineries there that year. A separate report suggests that there were 1.48
million visits rather than visitors to
wineries in the significantly tinier state
of Oregon while the New York Wine &
Grape Foundation reckons that, in 2004,
the Finger Lakes region of New York
State benefited from over $300m in
wine-related tourism expenditures. By
comparison, the number of visitors who
walked through the doors of wineries
anywhere in France is estimated at just 7
million. It may come as a small consolation
that this figure comfortably beats
Australias 5 million, but this has to be
set against the limited size of its population,
wine and tourist industries, the lack of
immediate neighbours and the healthy
growth Australian wine tourism has

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shown in recent years. There are hopes

in several Gallic regions that numbers
will increase significantly, but little reason
to believe that they will do so at the same
rate as they have in California, where
they have shot up by a third since MFK
last looked at the figures in 2002.
France, like the rest of Europe, has
failed to match the New World in the field
of wine tourism for much the same reason
that it has not put together a top class
team of cricketers or baseball players;
historically it hasnt or at least in the
case of most of its regions - seen a reason
to do so. In the New World, the Cellar
Door Operation a shop and tasting room
that might make as much money from
the sale of branded t-shirts and baseball
caps as of wine is part of the business
plan that is presented to banks and
investors before the first grapes are crushed.
In Europe in general and France in
particular, a highly-structured industry
has traditionally allocated the role of
selling wine to merchants who, in turn,
have tended to trade on a wholesale basis
with their counterparts overseas.
Dealing with individual consumers has
not generally been a consideration. Despite
the numerous Degustation signs outside wine estates, only 8% of Frances
wine is sold directly by the people who
make it. There are, however, two interesting exceptions to this rule. In Alsace
20% of the volume and an even more
impressive 30% of value is sold in this
way. This region, whose picture book,
hotel, gift shop, restaurant and caf filled
villages display a keen understanding of
the tourist indus-try, was revealingly, one
of only two that did not have to request
extra distillation rights after the 2005
harvest. The other was Champagne,
where the major houses, at least, daily
open their doors to hundreds and sometimes thousands of visitors.

WINE TOURISM

At this point, it is perhaps worth pausing

to consider what precisely is meant by
wine tourism. For many members of the
industry, the expression refers to little
more than a willingness to sample and
sell wine at the cellar door. But wine tourism
should be about more than that. Ross
Brown of Brown Brothers in Australia,
which despite its out-of-the-way location
in north-east Victoria, welcomes over
100,000 visitors every year, makes the
point that there is a disconnect between
what wineries want to offer visitors and
what those visitors are looking for. Most
of the visitors havent come with any
clear intention to buy. Theyre looking to
be entertained. In other words, visiting
a winery is often an alternative to visiting
a zoo or a museum. Give your visitors a
good time and if youre lucky theyll buy
some bottles - just as they might pick up
souvenirs in the zoo or museum shop.
Whether or not you make that sale,
Brown makes another point. You build
your brand and relationships with existing, new and potential customers and,
perhaps most usefully of all, you have
access to the kind of consumer research
you might never otherwise be able to
afford. Often new styles of wine and packaging are tried out on visitors before
being unleashed on a wider world. In
Marlborough, while Cloudy Bay was considering whether to adopt screwcaps for
wines it would ship overseas, visitors
were routinely given the choice between
corks and the alternative closure.
Marlborough may only have 70 or so
wineries, but it offers a far broader range
of well-signposted tourist attractions, in
terms of cafes, restaurants and tasting
rooms than the whole of Bordeaux,
where there are over 10,000 chteaux.
Mouton Rothschild with its museum and
Smith Haut-Lafitte with its spa, hotel and
restaurant are still glaring exceptions to
the regional rule. Far too often, the
emphasis is on opening doors to small
numbers of enthusiasts.
The philosophical gulf that still separates
Bordeaux from Napa and Marlborough
was further revealed late in 2006 in the
reference by the Les Echos Judiciaires
Girondins of the imminent opening of a
new winery lamricaine in the Medoc.

QUOTE UNQUOTE

In Bordeaux, sadly,

the common response has

been jealousy

Alice Tourbier
Alice Tourbier is
director of Les Sources
de Caudalie at Chteau
Smith Haut-Lafitte, a
hotel and spa with
50 rooms and
two restaurants.

This Euro 12m commercial and tourist

facility to be launched by the ngociant
Marjolaine will indeed resemble many a
Californian winery, but it might just as
easily have been called a winery a la
nouvelle zelandaise, australienne or
sud africaine.
The Marjolaine project, however, will
in any case still be eclipsed by 2006s
starriest piece of wine tourism: the new
$100m Marques de Riscal City of Wine
designed by Frank Gehry with winery,
Starwood hotel and spa in Rioja.
But the coining of the term Oenotourisme has been accompanied by a
number of recent French regional and
international efforts. Among these have
been the creation of the Global Network
of Great Wine Capitals, allying the
French city with Oporto, Florence, Cape
Town, Melbourne, Mendoza and two
towns referred to as Bilbao-Rioja and San
Francisco-Napa Valley. Apart from
hosting a website that promotes events in
the regions, the network also runs the
annual Best Of Wine Tourism awards.
While another group called Tourvin
brings together Bordeaux, the Loire,
Rioja as well as the Douro and Vinho
Verde, local efforts have also been set up
in regions such as the Corbires and the
Rhne. All of these will help to build
Frances place on the wine tourism map,
but the greatest impact will almost
certainly be created by dynamic individual
producers like la Marjolaine and Georges
Duboeuf, whose Hameau du Vin in the
Beaujolais has welcomed over a million
visitors since its opening in 1993.

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