A sustainable perspective for wine tourism management

Enotourism is often viewed as a sustainable and innovative form of tourism with great growth potential that can promote economic development at a local, regional, and national level. Sustainability – economic, sociocultural, and environmental – is a key factor in developing a thriving wine tourism industry. Sustainable wine tourism depends largely on the identification and successful management of the complex relationship between resources used, the particular type of enotourism development, and the impacts caused by wine tourism sector growth. This chapter employs the case of Chile as an example of the sustainability challenges involved in wine tourism development. Despite the existence of certain impediments to the growth of wine tourism, including infrastructure gaps and lack of qualified, local personnel, the country has adopted sustainable practices – especially in the winemaking process – and developed fruitful collaboration and networks between public and private stakeholders. The main objectives of this chapter are to explore the bottlenecks to sustainable enotourism development – particularly issues related to governance and collaboration between stakeholders, environmental sustainability, and linkages with the local community – as well as offering recommendations to address these issues. Some of the recommendations may be of particular interest to other wine-producing regions – both in the Old and New Worlds – so as to avoid the pitfalls of unsustainable development of their enotourism sector.