Toward a Clarification of the Definition of Wine Tourism

In the last two decades, wine tourism has globally augmented, expanding from the New Word to the Old World countries. Its growing popularity at the international level has been accompanied by an increased heterogeneity of activities associated with wine tourism. Although the high variety of wine tourism activities can be an advantage from a destination marketing perspective, one of the challenges might be to give a universal definition of activities that can legitimately be associated with wine tourism and therefore express what wine tourism is and what is not. So far, the most commonly used definitions of wine tourism are from Hall (1996), Hall et al. (1997) and Getz (2000). However, considering the recent global growth of wine tourism, we call on the need to lay the groundwork for designing a consensual definition for wine tourism, exploring the activities wine tourism may encompass. In that view, we have collaborated  with the Great Wine Capitals, a network of 12 major cities and hundreds of wineries located in both the northern and southern hemispheres whose goal is to achieve excellence in wine tourism within the global alliance of its renowned wine regions.