Cultural Routes and Heritage Trails - Tourism and Trails: Cultural, Ecological and Management Issues - page 49

lists the top producing wine countries, where many of the established old world
regions have competition from emergent new world regions. With respect to
the former, many old time wine-producing regions have long been well-
established wine destinations (e.g. France, California and Spain). However, the
latter part of the 20th century saw the emergence of many older wine regions
as tourist destinations, and even more recently, we have seen many non-
traditional wine areas develop and enter the marketplace specifically for tour-
ism (e.g. Arizona, USA). Along with the growth of wine tourism, wine routes
have also flourished. Shortly after the collapse of eastern European commu-
nism, Hungary put together its first wine route, and Moldova is currently in
the process of assembling wine routes to attract international tourists (Sharples,
2002: 46). Other non-traditional wine tourism destinations have joined the
bandwagon to promote wine routes as important tourist attractions to increase
visitation and keep visitors longer.
Prior to discussing a number of examples of wine and later food routes/
trails in the world, it is important first to address the issue of scale when
the synergy of food, wine and tourism are involved. Wine and food trails
are themed to sell a product; in some situations a singular product such as
malt whisky (Scotland) can be strong enough to develop distinctive facili-
ties (supply) around a number of distilleries and the activities these offer
for tourists (Martin & McBoyle, 2006). In contrast, food and wine trails
exist in other parts of the world (e.g. Australia) where they usually do not
have the same advantage, as they more often consist of micro-businesses
that do not see themselves as part of tourism supply and have limited capi-
tal to invest in specific tourism programs, attractions and activities (Mason &
O'Mahony, 2007).
Large-scale wine routes have been established in South America, for
example, Chile and Uruguay (Alonso, 2013; Sharples, 2002). South Africa's
wine regions have also set up wine roads (Bruwer, 2003; Nowers et al. , 2002).
In Canada, most notably Ontario and British Columbia (Hashimoto &
Telfer, 2003; Telfer, 2000), vini-trails are flourishing, as they are beginning
to do in New Zealand (Hall & Macionis, 1998), Israel (Jaffe & Pasternak,
2004) and various parts of Spain and Portugal (López-Guzmán & Sánchez
Cañizares, 2008; López-Guzmán et al. , 2009; Medina & Tresserras, 2008;
Simões, 2008) (Figure 2.10).
A common definition of a wine route is 'a sign-posted itinerary, through
a well-defined area . . . whose aim is the “discovery” of the wine products in
the region and the activities associated with it' (Brunori & Rossi, 2000: 410;
Gallenti & Galli, 2002: 157). Wine routes developed as important purposive
trails that adjoin producers and consumers through visits to wineries, vine-
yards, cellars, retail shops, restaurants, museums, cheese producers, food
vendors, visitor information offices and wine festivals. The entire rural land-
scape is an important part of the experience in areas where wine helps define
the heritage and sense of place. As early as the 1920s, wine roads had been