Bubbly brought fame and fortune to Champagne, and now, since being named a Unesco world heritage site in July, the region hopes more tourists will make it a holiday destination. Same for Burgundy, whose vineyards are already a big draw – it, too, is now on Unesco’s roll of honour. The double good news marks a major gain for France, which is trying hard to make wine a pillar of its tourist economy, reports The Guardian.
Laurent Fabius, the country’s foreign minister and a strong backer of tourism, has made the wine sector a priority. His goal is to attract 100 million tourists to France, up from 82 million in 2012, with wine as one of the principal draws. According to a 2010 study by the tourism development agency Atout France (Rendezvous En France, in English), a third of visitors say they choose their destination based on, among other things, food and wine. The agency estimates 7.5 million people a year tour the country’s wineries, including 2.5 million foreign visitors.
France’s wine industry has long promoted tourism, and that has helped smaller producers survive. Indeed, tourism has become an essential part of their business, as important as promoting their wines at trade shows and, of course, exporting them.
It’s difficult to say how much is bought by tourists on site, but the income from direct sales contributes appreciably to the more than 12 billion euros ($13bn) of annual sales of wine in France, according to a 2013 study by the government’s FranceAgriMer agency. “We sell 40% of our production to visitors who’ve come to see us and another 30% goes to export,” said Florian Beck-Hartweg, who runs an organic vineyard in the east Alsatian commune of Dambach-la-Ville. “There has to be one person on staff at all times for cellar tours and tastings. Afterwards, our clients keep up with us on Facebook. We post news almost every day on what we’re doing. Social networks allow us to stay in touch.”
Alsace was the first wine region in France to establish a tourist “route des vins”. For more than 60 years, the region has been devising itineraries to help navigate its network of hundreds of producers, large and small. “We came up with the ‘picnic with a winemaker’ concept 15 years ago,” said Philippe Blanck, co-owner of the Kientzheim winery Domaine Paul Blanck & Fils and president of the trade association Vignerons indépendants de France.
“This year,” he said, “we attracted 25,000 visitors from across France.” The association loved the picnic idea and now, every May over the Pentecost weekend, its members open their vineyards to visitors.
Inspired by such initiatives, government and industry have stepped in to give some structure and professionalism to the process, something they feel befits France’s status as the world’s top wine-producing country (46.7m hectolitres a year), biggest wine exporter (with an estimated 4.7 billion euros in sales in 2014), and number-one tourist destination (more than 84 million visitors in 2014).
In 2000, Atout France set up what it called a “wine tourism cluster”. In 2009, under agriculture minister Michel Barnier, the government then established an advisory body, the Conseil supérieur de l’œnotourisme. Its founding director was Paul Dubrule, former CEO of Accor, the multinational hotel chain, and owner of Domaine de la Cavale winery in Cucuron, in the Vaucluse. He was succeeded last year by Florence Cathiard, owner of Château Smith Haut Lafitte, in Bordeaux, and since then a new name has appeared on the wine tourism landscape: Vignobles et découvertes.
The designation covers an area that, in a radius of about 30km, offers everything a wine tourist needs: accommodation, restaurants, estate tours and also access to cultural and natural heritage sites, all of approved quality. While the new designation has sparked a lot of interest in the tourism industry, it has yet to make its full mark on tourists themselves. To date, some 54 destinations have been classified Vignobles et découvertes. The designation brings together wineries and tourist services.
It has had mixed results from region to region. For example, tourists usually visit the Savoie for the skiing, not the wine, though some do make a trip to the vineyards and taste local wines such as Chignin, Crépy and Chautagne – in fact, three-quarters of all Savoy wines are consumed in situ. It’s the same story in Corsica, which tourists visit for the landscape and climate. Local winemakers promote their products to visitors and sell to restaurants on the island. In contrast, in the Loire Valley, which has been a Unesco world heritage site since 2000, the region’s wine and food are as much a part of the allure as the historic cities and castles.