30 November 2006
Others
According to the surveys carried out in this study, it seems that the reason why wine-producers are offering visits to their wineries is to sell their produce direct to the publicin their own establishments. This results from the fact that the current proliferation of wineries throughout all the regions with protected designation of origin (DO in Spain - guarantee of origin and quality of a wine), has given rise to excess production, which is not possible to sell through the normal channels.
However, wine-producers are aware that wine tourism is complementary to their main activity, that of producing and selling wine. Therefore, if they want to take part in enotourism, they have to equip their wineries for this purpose, and realise that they are entering a new sector. Hence, Luis Vicente Elías Pastor suggests that, in this case, viticulturists and wine-producers should be prepared.
Experts in tourism seem to agree that this is the right time to launch the product but under certain conditions. In the first place, become aware of the fact that vineyards and wine are a source of income, regardless of their agricultural and commercial value. It should be borne in mind that a winery is an industrial facility that is not adequately adapted to welcome visitors in most of the cases. However, in the wineriesbuilt today, there is more awareness and interest in welcoming visitors. Therefore, they are being equipped, in many cases under the expert advice of famous architects, with observation areas away from the working activity. In the case of traditional wineries, much concern is shown towards the adaptation and fitting out of wineries for visitors. Another deficiency that has been revealed is the lack of written information in wineries about the wine regions, type of wines,grape varieties, etc.
Other problems are competition between tourist facilities (restaurants and wineries, for example), or the difficulty in finding experts who, on the one hand, know the ?wine culture?, and on the other, are well-qualified to welcome and deal with visitors, not to mention the knowledge of foreign languages. For the first case, the author suggests the collaboration, the synergy, which can only result from planning based on the fact that one?s benefit is directly proportional to another?s benefit.
As for the second problem, this is the aim of the new Specialisation Course in Enological Tourism, organised by the Institute of Leisure Studies at the University of Deusto, and which has been jointly presented with this research on wine tourism. This new course is designed to be a training route that may enable those professionals in this field to acquire the necessary knowledge and competences related to the management of wine, txakoli (light, sharp, Basque wine) and cider tourism.
