Title: Wine tourism as a non-core business strategy for small wineries

Authors: Giuseppe Festa; Maria Teresa Cuomo; Pantea Foroudi; Gerardino Metallo

Addresses: Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Salerno, Italy ' Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Salerno, Italy ' Department of Marketing Branding and Tourism, Middlesex University, UK ' Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Salerno, Italy

Abstract: In recent years, wineries have been implementing increasingly more wine tourism activities as complementary or supplementary services to enhance their wine products. This paper adopts an inductive research paradigm based on grounded investigation; more specifically, this paper begins with a case study and expands to involve further similar evidence. The findings of this study show that, for wineries, wine tourism represents a fundamental opportunity for communication (institutional and commercial), distribution (as a form of direct channel), and growth (to include tasting, catering, hospitality, and so on). Most importantly, for both scholars and managers, the results of the research highlight that wine tourism can become the main source of the business value, especially in the case of small wineries (an example of which is examined in the case study under analysis). In these situations, however, wine production still characterises the business because, otherwise, there can be no wine tourism, but wine production is not realistically critical to the business in terms of survival, competitiveness, and development.

Keywords: core business; good practices; grounded theory; non-core business theory; wine business; wine tourism.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMFA.2020.109136

International Journal of Managerial and Financial Accounting, 2020 Vol.12 No.2, pp.149 - 164

Received: 19 Sep 2019
Accepted: 09 Apr 2020
Published online: 21 Aug 2020 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article