From Wine Appreciation to Wine Tourism: Likely Impacts of Climate Change on Wine Tourism Choices
摘要
This chapter attempts to describe possible impacts on wine tourism from climate change. In particular, it asks the question “What happens to wine tourism in a wine region when climate change forces winemakers to change the wine or style of the wine?” The chapter examines the impacts of climate change on winemaking and concludes that the effects are pronounced and already in evidence. The wine regions most significantly affected by the changing climate are those in warm-climate regions and particularly those in Old-World European regions. Cool-climate and New-World winemakers are less affected, although if the climate continues to change, they will eventually be forced to adapt by significantly changing the wines they produce, or even to abandon their wine regions entirely. The chapter offers a comparison of the Douro River in Portugal (warm-climate and old-world) with the Finger Lakes region of New York State, USA (cool-climate and new-world), to illustrate how and why these two wine regions may be affected differently by climate change. The relationship between changing wines and wine styles and wine tourism is far less clear, due to a scarcity of existing current research in this area. The chapter introduces results from a survey of wine consumers in the USA, conducted in 2023, as an initial attempt to determine whether or not there is any relationship between changes in a region’s wine styles, and changes in its level of wine tourism. The survey is limited to a narrow audience and presents some challenges to generalization, but it does indicate the existence of a relationship. The conclusions include a call for more research to study a broader group of wine consumers and prospective tourists, drawn from multiple nations and selected randomly.