I sat down at the June 24 Vinexpo session on Wine Tourism with a certain amount of expectation as tourism is critical to wine producers facing declining sales around the world. Topics on the conference agenda included the role of wine tourism to wineries, how to market to tour operators, and how things like online social networks, blogs, wine clubs and art can be used to market a wine region.
Most of the small, family-owned vineyards that I write about in The Vine Route view the printing of business cards as a major marketing investment, so I didn’t really see how displaying fine art within the winery might be relevant to them, but I do think that French wine regions outside of the well-known Bordeaux and Burgundy appellations could market themselves much more aggressively. And ever since I did some consulting work with the Chianti Classico “Gallo Nero” wine consortium in the mid-1990s, I have been fascinated with the synergetic power of wine, beautiful landscapes, history and culture, and good food.
Kicking off the conference was Terry Hall, Communications Director for the 60-year-old Napa Valley Vintners, a regional trade association of nearly 325 wineries. Almost 20,000 jobs are directly related to wineries, winemaking and wine tourism in the Napa Valley, which is arguably the most highly marketed wine region in the world. And around 5 million tourists, who pump over a billion dollars a year into the local economy, come to see the region’s wineries and vineyards annually.
Hall reminded the audience that even though Napa Valley represents a majority of wine revenue generated in the state of California, it is, in reality, quite small in size; only 4% of the grape acreage in the state is found there, he said. A great number of the wine tourists are repeat visitors, he explained, coming to Napa Valley because of its proximity to San Francisco, its outstanding natural beauty, and, he added with a wink-wink, as he was delivering his speech in Bordeaux, it’s great wine.
Tourism, he said, is viewed quite favorably and does help to pay the bills, but there is a delicate balance to maintain the rural character of the area. Gridlock is common on both of the only two roadways that traverse the valley from north to south. There have been constant battles to keep out amusement theme parks and projects that would pave over vineyards to put in roads to ease traffic congestion. Hall said that being stuck behind a tractor pulling a trailer full of grapes is a small price to pay to keep Napa Valley as an authentic wine destination.
Join the club
Estelle Téhan from Château Fonplégade in Bordeaux, the following speaker, is employed by American billionaire Stephen Adams, who collects Bordeaux wine chateaux like most wealthy wine collectors collect grand cru wine. Château Fonplégade is one of six chateaux that he has purchased on Bordeaux’s right bank in the past nine years. Critics have noted that wines from his estates have steadily improved over the past few years. His early wines, from four of five years back, have been called “poster children” for the big, boisterous, over-oaked and over-extracted Bordeaux that were popular with a certain well-known American wine critic. The taste of those wines is not surprising considering that the wine consultant for all of his chateaux is Michel Rolland, vilified in the film Mondovino as an agent of wine globalization and fruit-heavy, oak-influenced red wines. The Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, incidentally, carries a prominent warning at the top of its Rolland page about the online information “missing citations” and needing footnotes “to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies,” and the text has the written-by-a-committee feel that one finds on Wikipedia entries about polemic characters where opposing camps pass their time concurrently editing and re-editing passages. Adams French Vineyard wines seem to have surmounted that controversy, and they are more harmonious and less like fruit-roll-ups-in-a-bottle today.
Adams made his billions in a banking, billboard, and recreational vehicle empire that he built in southern California. His French wine chateau empire, and three wineries in California that he also purchased recently, is being built using a similar strategy of vertical integration and a portfolio of differently priced products. This strategy included his own US wine import company, a wine shipping firm and the wine clubs like the one run by Téhan at Château Fonplégade.
She explained that wine club members receive free visits and tastings at the chateau, a discount on all wines and gift items purchased at the gift shop, a newsletter, and, four times a year, bottles of wine from the chateau, along with tasting notes and information about the vintage. I didn’t have the opportunity to ask how successful the very-American-concept of marketing wine through a wine club worked in France, but the concept certainly exists here in more embryonic forms, such as using customer mailing lists.
Wine as art, Wine as social networking
This presentation was followed by one titled “Return on investment of the opening of a museum in a winery,” a seemingly no starter for any but the wealthiest of vineyard owners, and a presentation from Germany about how to market your wine region to nearby urbanites. The two remaining speakers discussed marketing wine tourism directly to tourism professionals and, finally, how social networks and blogs impact people’s decision to visit a wine region. B2B marketing directly to tourism offices is probably best left to wine regions or appellations, but most any vineyard could benefit from the advice offered by Dr. Evelyne Resnick, co-founder of ReSMO, a Paris-based international consultancy for electronic marketing for fine wines and food. Resnick, who has a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in Paris and who taught at UCLA, has authored several books, including Wine Brands.
Her advice to have a well-designed website with attractive photos and interesting information is as appropriate for vineyards of any size as it is true for any business. In particular for women, young adults and what she called “emerging countries” (New World wine countries?), she recommends investing time and effort into using an array of web marketing tools such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn-type professional networks.
Do-it-yourself wine tourism
All of these mentions about Napa Valley charity auctions that raise millions of dollars, wine clubs, museums and wine region tours for tourist operators got me to thinking that maybe this sort of grand cru wine tourist marketing was missing an important target audience. While reviewing the website of the conference organizer—The Great Wine Capitals Global Network, I stumbled upon a presentation prepared by Iole Piscolla, Director of Italy’s Wine Route Tourism Center.
One of the survey findings, which is self-evident and which I’m sure would be true for other countries with wine regions, was that wine tourists in Italy were mostly from the middle and upper classes. But what I found to be interesting was that, among these tourists, they had identified a growing trend in “do-it-yourself” wine tourism, versus organized tours. The Internet was mentioned as the primary source of information, along with “word-of-mouth” referrals. The majority of the wine tourists interviewed in Italy (42%) had a “mid-level knowledge about wine,” while slightly less (38%) had “little or no knowledge about wine,” and just 20% were “wine experts.”
The conclusion drawn by Piscolla from the survey results was that the greatest potential for wine tourism in the future was in the following 7 areas:
• Eco-Tourism
• Wine and Food Tourism
• Rural Tourism
• Cycle Tourism
• Educational Tourism
• Recreational Tourism
• Sports Tourism
He believes that existing networks of local tourist services can leverage the inherent beauty and natural resources found in the majority of wine regions to draw tourists interested in visiting rural areas. Pairing local wines with the wealth of local culinary specialties found in Old World wine regions is another area worth promoting. Another bit of interesting information is data cited in the survey from a study done by the Washington-based Conservation International, a non-profit organization dedicated to conserving Earth’s living natural heritage and global biodiversity. According to Conservation International, one out of five tourists now chooses a nature trip.
This back-to-nature trend, along with young people’s awareness of the environment and ecology, presents wine regions and individual vineyards with an opportunity to promote their regions and their wine. By coordinating their resources, maybe building some cycling paths and developing other recreational opportunities (canoeing, kayaking, rock climbing, etc.), attracting and supporting some good local restaurants offering regional cuisine, and then promoting these attractions through the Internet as a total tourist experience, they might be able to help preserve the countryside, increase employment and sell more wine.
France being France, a grassroots operation to improve wine tourism is about as likely as seeing teeth on one of those hens that patrol a good number of French rural gardens. The Minister of Agriculture and the Secretary of State announced in March that they were joining efforts to create a Conseil Supérieur de l’Oenotourisme. The object of this new organization is to combine the country’s wine and winemaking tradition with France’s rich cultural and architectural heritage to create a more attractive and interesting wine tourism experience. Plans include identifying particularly attractive wine-local heritage routes with a Vin et Patrimonie designation, and awarding a Prix National de l’Oenotourisme to note exceptional wine tourism best practices as well as tourism training efforts.
And maybe this just might work. Take the southwestern France Languedoc-Roussillon region for example. It would be nice to see this region’s magnificent treasures, which include the World Heritage site of Carcassone, the largest medieval town in Europe with its ancient city walls still intact; the impossibly high Cathar mountain fortresses; the world’s oldest working canal, the 240-km-long Canal du Midi, an incredible feat of 17th-century engineering; and its numerous abbeys, cathedrals and prehistoric caves being used to encourage people to visit what has been the largest vineyard in the world for more than 2,000 years. I’m encouraged by the opening, in April, of The Maison Languedoc-Roussillon in New York City, which I want to write about more in the near future, where producers from the region will be holding wine tastings for invited journalists, chefs and sommeliers. Maybe this top-down approach might work…
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I enjoyed reading this post and found it very informative. Just found your blog and will add it to my google reader so I can read future post.
Pat
Thanks, Pat, I’m glad that you enjoyed that post.
“France being France, a grassroots operation to improve wine tourism is about as likely as seeing teeth on one of those hens that patrol a good number of French rural gardens” – well said:-)… they will start, as you mention already, by creating a new governmental board or cryptically signed association…
But as a small winery owner in a beautiful landscape, who has been trying to promote the richness of my region via several blogs for 4 years now, I can confirm, that it’s worth while, to deliver broader information to “do-it-yourself” tourists and wine-amateurs. Our Midi region in the South of France, just an hour away from the overcrowded coast is ideal for day-trips, which change people from pure sunbathing on the sand during their family holiday during summer. While the fathers (and more and more mothers:-) Benjie tasting the wines in the cellar, they normally don’t get across in their supermarket, children usually enjoy playing around with the cats – if they a older, they may have their first “sniff” of wine in a glass, which interests them, when they’ve learned before, where it grows and how it follows its way from the vines into the bottle. It’s like discovering, that milk comes from cows before ending in tetra-bricks…and by this way, it’s an “investment into the future” for the wine maker…
In spring and autumn, it’s more likely, to receive couples, who like to combine sightseeing, nature, light sports and the tasting of local products. Following the whole circuit of the vineyard before diving into the cellar provides them with all of it – and they are very often fond of being able to drive home with a box of bottles, to remind them of all the aromas met during their promenade on the hill-slope…
Fixing these intimate meeting on rendez-vous only, helps the owner, to be totally available for his guests and to receive them individually, so to consecrate enough time, to make them feel really welcome.
Nothing to do with the receptions of whole cars of tourists in a scheduled program guided by a sales-person, you could find in bigger structures and which are often considered from these clients as pure entertainment, without creating a firther attachment to what should be the center of interest:
a deeper understanding of the marvelous transformation of simple fruit into something that can make you dream and recall everything you have met in it’s birth place…
Well said, Iris. I’ll be writing next week about Iris and her Lisson vineyard, deep in the wild, beautiful Parc Régional Du Haut Languedoc, in the Languedoc-Roussillon’s Hérault department. The photos and story of this amazing woman’s battle with the park’s wild boar to make natural wine will make you want to visit her.
I find all your knowledge and history in these blogs stimulating for a mind “thirsty” for information regarding wines. I cannot stop reading all these blogs.
What way would you suggest for a “beginner” to start learning about wines?
I am very picky about wine and know almost instantly if I like a wine or not, that
is how I base my limited wine judgements. I do not like most red wines. I will confess I do not drink expensive wines and have found when I have tried expensive wines I do not like them more than less costlier wines.
Is there such a thing as not liking red wines at all?
Thank you,
Heide Steinkraus
Heide, I appreciate your comments and interest in my writing. Your questions are good ones, and I agree with you that price does not always equal quality. The best wine, as you pointed out, is the one that you enjoy. I, too, enjoy a good white wine, and I can see nothing wrong in not liking red wine–but, perhaps, you just haven’t identified a red wine to your taste. To find good wine at a reasonable price (at least French wine), you need to look outside of Bordeaux and Burgundy, where the wines are priced to reflect their reputations. I would suggest reading some of the books that I’ve recommended on my blog (“RECOMMENDED READING”). If you buy any of these after clicking on the link from my site, I receive a small commission from Amazon, which is how I hope to make some money from this blog. I’ve also added some Google ads, as they also bring in a little income. In reality, it’s only my interest in French wine, and the passionate men and women who make traditional, natural wine, that keeps blogs like this one going, as any income pays only for the site hosting fee. Now that this commercial message has ended, I would suggest that you consider taking a wine course. Decanter.com has a list of courses in different parts of the world. I took an online introduction to wine course through the University of California at Davis that has proven to be very useful. The French Wine Society in Washington, DC has created online interactive courses and wine appreciation events that are informative and interesting. There are too many wine blogs to list here, but I hope to cover that subject on my blog in the future. I hope that you continue to enjoy The Vine Route and please don’t hesitate to send any questions or comments to me.
Tom,
Thank you for your generous reply. I will purchase one on your books and take
your educational recommendations, plus keep reading your blogs of course.
Thanks, Heide, that’s an early Christmas present for me. Please email me directly at the email address listed on the ABOUT page if I can be of any assistance to you. I wish you and yours a safe and joyous holiday season and all the best for the new year.