Sustainable Wine and Food Products as Precursors of Sustainable Wine Tourism

Wine tourism is usually described from the visitor's side — the tasting, the cellar door, the view over the vines. This study turns to the supply side, asking the people who actually make the wine and run the wineries how a genuinely sustainable wine tourism product might be built. Drawing on interviews with 140 winery owners and managers across eight nations, it argues that sustainable tourism does not begin at the point of visitation at all, but upstream: in how grapes are grown, how food is sourced, and how producers relate to their territory and to one another.

How the research was done

The study is exploratory and qualitative, grounded in the tenets of corporate social responsibility, stakeholder theory, and corporate sustainability. From an initial pool of 232 wineries identified across Central Europe (Germany and Switzerland), Southern Europe (Italy, Portugal and Spain) and three emerging wine-producing nations (Bolivia, India and Peru), 140 wineries and 142 leaders agreed to take part. Participants needed at least two years in the industry, experience receiving visitors on site, and a leadership position. Semi-structured, open-ended interviews — conducted in five languages, mostly online but with on-site visits in Bolivia, Italy, Spain and Switzerland — were transcribed, translated, and analysed using qualitative content analysis and the Gioia data-structure method, building from first-order codes to second-order themes to aggregate dimensions. Comparisons were drawn between cultural settings and between wineries with and without an on-site restaurant.

What the research found

The analysis produced 15 overarching dimensions across three domains: wine production, gastronomy, and wine tourism. In wine production, the dominant themes were the wine production antecedents — care for the vineyard, organic methods, and reduced chemical use — and a broader wine production philosophy of proactivity, attachment to territory, and voluntary sustainable practice. Financial motives, by contrast, were rarely cited, and regulation appeared as an 'authority-led' driver only at the margins. In gastronomy, a 'benign gastronomic philosophy' centred on sourcing food locally emerged as the single most frequent code, complemented by dimensions linking local food and wine and engaging stakeholders across the supply chain. In wine tourism itself, six dimensions appeared, ranging from conceptual and internally-based sustainability to alliance-based sustainability built on networks and collaboration.

Clear cross-national and structural patterns emerged. Southern European participants leaned towards organic production and elevating the destination's image; Central European participants stressed reducing chemical use and wastage; producers in emerging nations emphasised natural vineyard management and water. Wineries with an on-site restaurant showed consistently stronger commitment to organic sourcing and to the multiplier effects of local food. Perhaps the most striking finding was an outlier the authors call the 'sustainability paradox' — the recognition, voiced by several participants, that wine tourism can itself be unsustainable when visitors drive long distances or overwhelm a small region, a tension that sits uncomfortably alongside the sector's sustainability rhetoric.

Insights for the industry

For winery leaders and destination managers, the central message is that a sustainable wine tourism product is assembled from the ground up rather than bolted on at the visitor-facing end. Embracing a territory's food and wine resources — local sourcing, food-wine pairings, on-site production — does more than reduce a supply chain's footprint; it strengthens the destination's authenticity and appeal, which visitors reward. The wineries that had most fully developed this were rarely acting alone: networks, cooperative certification, and shared regional branding recurred as the mechanisms through which small producers reach the critical mass that sustainability initiatives require.

The study also cautions against treating sustainability as a one-off achievement. The producers who spoke most convincingly described continual reassessment through product diversification, creativity, and investment, alongside consumer education. And the sustainability paradox is a genuine strategic problem, not a rhetorical flourish: a region that draws visitors by car to a remote cellar door may be undermining the very credentials it promotes. Addressing that — through better transport links, overnight stays, and honest communication — is, on this evidence, part of what sustainable wine tourism actually demands.