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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 funis still in its infancy, observes Robert Joseph.

As Frances wine industry slowly

begins to acknowledge the fright-

ening 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 pre-

sentation left me feeling distinctly less

convinced about a rapidly growing inter-

national 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 thethen 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 foundmyself 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

Growers and the Wine Institute of

California in 2005, nearly 20 million people

visited wineries there that year. A sepa-

rate 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. Bycomparison, 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

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 industryhas 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 out-

side wine estates, only 8% of Frances

wine is sold directly by the people who

make it. There are, however, two inter-

esting exceptions to this rule. In Alsace

20% of the volume and an even more

impressive 30% of value is sold in thisway. 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 some-

times thousands of visitors.

Visitors

California 20m

France 7m

Italy 9m

Spain 6m

Australia 5m

South Africa 2.5m

New Zealand 0.4m

Wine Tourism by country1

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S OU RC E : WI NE B US I NE SS I N TE RN AT IO NA L , 20 07 M AR Q UE S D E RI SC A L CI T Y OF W I NE

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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. RossBrown 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 exis-

ting, 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 packa-

ging are tried out on visitors before

being unleashed on a wider world. InMarlborough, while Cloudy Bay was con-

sidering 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 andrestaurant 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.

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 Oeno-

tourisme has been accompanied by a

number of recent French regional andinternational 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 VinhoVerde, 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.

11

In Bordeaux, sadly,the common response has

been jealousyAlice Tourbier

Q U O T E U N Q U O T E

Alice Tourbier is

director of Les Sources

de Caudalie at Chteau

Smith Haut-Lafitte, a

hotel and spa with

50 rooms and

two restaurants.

W I N E T O U R I S M