who is the wine tourist?

Who is the wine tourist?

For a long time, the wine tourist seemed easy to identify. He was a wine lover — often knowledgeable, sometimes a collector — travelling to famous vineyards in search of prestigious bottles, tastings and encounters with producers.

But this portrait is becoming increasingly incomplete.

Today, the wine tourist is not necessarily travelling only for wine. Increasingly, wine is becoming a gateway to something larger: a landscape, a gastronomy, a culture, a heritage and a particular way of life.

From wine tasting to territorial experience

France offers one of the clearest examples of this transformation.

In 2024, around 12 million tourists practised wine tourism in France, 20% more than in 2016. France has around 10,000 wine sites open to visitors, while the Vignobles & Découvertes network brings together dozens of destinations and thousands of tourism and wine professionals. (Atout France, 2025)

But the most revealing change may not be the number of visitors. It is the strategic status of wine tourism.

In June 2025, Nathalie Delattre, then France's Minister Delegate for Tourism, presented a national roadmap for wine tourism and announced an ambitious objective: to make France Europe's leading wine-tourism destination by 2030. The roadmap explicitly connects wine tourism with diversification, rural territories, accessibility, professional training, ecological transition and innovation. (Ministère de l’Économie, 2025)

This is significant because wine tourism is no longer considered simply a way for wineries to sell more wine.

It generates value across a wider territorial ecosystem: wineries, restaurants, hotels, transport providers, guides, tourism offices, artisans and cultural organisations. The French national tourism agency Atout France estimates around €5.4 billion in annual revenue generated by wine tourism.

In other words, the visitor who comes for wine does not necessarily remain within the wine industry.

He or she enters a territory.

The wine tourist is becoming an experience seeker

The international picture confirms that this transformation is not uniquely French.

The Global Wine Tourism Report 2025, led by Professor Gergely Szolnoki of Hochschule Geisenheim University in collaboration with UN Tourism, the OIV, the Great Wine Capitals Global Network and WineTourism.com, is based on responses from 1,310 wineries in 47 countries. (Hochschule Geisenheim University, 2025)

The report shows that wine tourism has become an important economic activity for wineries and rural regions. Two out of three wineries consider wine tourism profitable or highly profitable, while tourism generates, on average, around 25% of winery revenue.

The visitor profile is changing too. The 45–65 age group remains dominant, but visitors aged 25–44 are becoming increasingly important. Younger travellers show growing interest in education, sustainability and gastronomy. At the same time, visitors are increasingly attracted by authentic, local, culinary, ecological and nature-based experiences.

Wine tastings, cellar visits and vineyard walks remain at the heart of wine tourism. But they are increasingly complemented by food-and-wine pairings, educational workshops, cultural events, vineyard activities and collaborations with local businesses. Storytelling and social media have also become important tools for developing the experience.

This tells us something important about the visitor.

The contemporary wine tourist does not necessarily want to know everything about wine.

They may want to understand the place behind the wine: to walk through the vineyard, meet the producer, discover the landscape, taste local food and understand the history of a family, a village or a region.

Ultimately, they want to understand why this particular wine could only have been produced here.

From the bottle to the territory

This is perhaps the most interesting transformation.

The traditional wine-tourism model was largely organised around the product:

wine → tasting → purchase

The emerging model is broader:

wine → terroir → landscape → culture → experience → territory

The economic logic changes with it.

A visitor who comes for a tasting may also spend money on accommodation, restaurants, local transport, cultural activities and wine purchases. The wine itself becomes only one component of the value created by the visit.

This is why wine tourism increasingly matters for destinations.

It can help diversify tourism, strengthen rural economies, distribute visitor flows and create connections between different local actors. The French government's 2030 roadmap explicitly presents wine tourism as a way to diversify the tourism offer, value rural territories and distribute tourism's economic benefits more widely.

So, who is the wine tourist?

Perhaps there is no longer one wine tourist. There are several.

There is the Connoisseur, travelling primarily for wine; the Explorer, looking for terroir and authenticity; the Hedonist, combining wine with gastronomy, hospitality and wellbeing; the Slow Traveller, attracted by landscapes, nature and a slower rhythm; and the Cultural Traveller, for whom wine is a way of understanding the history and identity of a place.

These profiles may overlap in the same person.

And this is precisely why wine tourism has become so interesting.

It sits at the intersection of several contemporary tourism trends: experiential travel, gastronomy, rural tourism, cultural tourism, sustainability and the search for authenticity.

Perhaps the question is no longer simply:

Who travels for wine?

But rather:

What makes people want to travel to a wine territory?

Wine is no longer necessarily the whole reason for visiting a wine region. For many visitors, it is part of a broader experience of the destination — its landscape, culture, gastronomy and way of life.

And this is where wine tourism becomes much more than tourism.

It becomes a way for a territory to tell its story, create value and build attractiveness.

The future of wine tourism may therefore depend less on how many people want to taste wine — and more on how many people want to discover the world behind it.

Sources

Atout France — L’œnotourisme
Ministère de l’Économie — France, première destination œnotouristique européenne d’ici 2030
Global Wine Tourism Report 2025 — Hochschule Geisenheim University