Entrepreneurship of Winemaking Enterprises in Mountain Less-Favored Areas: An Empirical Study

Entrepreneurship, a highly intriguing and fairly new scientific and scholarly field, has generated outstanding global research for the last three decades. The present research investigates entrepreneurship in mountain less-favored areas, a poorly researched topic, by mainly focusing on the winemaking industry. The research, exploring the conclusive conditions and opportunities for the rapidly growing wine sector in mountain less-favoured areas, which is a critical sector for the local communities and economy, was carried out in a less-favoured area, Amynteo, Florina, located away from major hubs for economic activity, displaying low prosperity indicators, and suffering the consequences of dwindling population in the context of the prolonged financial crisis. Data collection relied both on a semi-structured interview and a questionnaire answered by 9 (out of 15) local winemaking enterprises. The research findings demonstrate that entrepreneurship in a mountain less-favored area can exploit potential disadvantages, such as isolation and adverse climate, and turn them into significant growth advantages for local entrepreneurship, and more specifically, for the local winemaking and wine tourism enterprises. The findings also highlight the critical role of development programs during the transition to the post-lignite era and the significance of state support actions aimed at increasing the competitive advantage of such areas by engaging stakeholders in promoting local state-of-the-art PDO products and the special regional features and potential.