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Portrait of the wine and food tourist

Mainly men (61.3%), Italian (62%) aged between 30 and 50 years old, mobile application lovers, who manage in total autonomy the holiday planning: here it is, the portrait of the 2011 wine tourists.

Author: Serena Rigato
Date: Feb 6, 2012 - 9:25:33 AM

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Mainly men (61.3%), Italian (62%) aged between 30 and 50 years old, mobile application lovers, who manage in total autonomy the holiday planning: here it is, the portrait of the 2011 wine tourists.

  Nowadays wine has become also a kind of tourist attraction, able to gather visitors from all around Italy and from abroad: there are many wine companies and wineries which decide to participate in promoting events and fairs connected to wine. An even more successful results is obtained when the wine companies, beyond producing good-quality wines, are near sporting structures, cultural places or museums, able to give a range of additional activity for wine and food tourists.  

«This kind of offer is a strategic asset- says Chiara Lungarotti, president of the Wine Tourist Movement- on which it is essential to invest to fully exploit the potentialities of growth of the wine tourism, which  now are just at 20%. It is then necessary that all the structures, public and non-public, hasten in order to valuate globally Italian territories, mixing together cultural heritage, promotion events, quality of oenological production and environmental tourism».  

According to a survey made by the Wine Tourism Movement on a sample of more than one thousand wineries which are part of the Movement and that was released on the occasion of Perugia International Conference of Wine Tourism, 62% of the wine tourists is Italian, but is the 38% of foreigners that spends more: wine foreign tourists are indeed more inclined to spend money to take home typical products of the Country they are visiting.  

38% of the people interviewed said they prefer May to travel and 55% declared that they prefer to travel during the week, to avoid the traffic of the week-end and the fully booked hotels.  

  Despite the fact that very often wine tourist travel in couple, most of them said they are more interested in the wine and food offer of the area and therefore in wineries, taverns, wine shops etc., more than in cultural events and in sports centers; for 90% of the people interviewed the favorite activity during the holidays is wine tasting together with, in 81% of cases, to a guided tour on the wineries. Indeed for the interviewees  the purpose of the holiday is the tasting of wine and food regional specialties and right for this reason the kind of event preferred by tourists is the “Open Winery”, the occasion in which a winery opens up for tourists, wine-lovers and curious (usually for 1-2 days maximum) organizing for the event a series of gastronomic matches for their wines, in cooperation with other companies of the area. On these occasions wine companies wisely match Prosecco Dry and regional cheeses or preserves, salami and red wines etc.  

To plan their travel and wineries visits the wine tourist uses mainly the web (in 66% of cases), preceded just by the positive past experience on a certain Region or city or by the jungle telegraph. The wine tourist indeed uses internet 6 times more than the national average of the tourists (10.6%).  



  Serena Rigato with support from vini veneti. For more information please visit ripasso, primitivo di manduria or ppc management      

Serena Rigato was born on 16/06/1986 in Padua. She studied Cultural Mediation for Business at the University of Padua and University of Birmingham (UK).  Currently she works for the web agency Prima Posizione srl where she deals with translations, makes article marketing in Italian, English , Spanish and  deals with ranking on search engines (SEO).  

View all articles by Serena Rigato

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