The wine industry contributes €130 bn to the EU's gross domestic product (GDP). While it represents only 0.8% of the EU’s total GDP, it accounts for almost half (47.9%) of the entire EU primary sector, including agriculture, forestry and fisheries.
When a panel of wine industry experts convened to discuss the latest SVB Annual Direct-to-Consumer Wine Survey Report, they also offered some suggestions on how to make more money. Felicity Carter listened in.
From restorative tourism to revitalising rural areas, Mariëtte du Toit-Helmbold has seen it all. She tells Felicity Carter what’s going on in South Africa.
Responding to some of the feedback to his recent piece on the challenges facing wine producers looking to reduce the weight of their bottles, Robert Joseph wonders whether the focus on the carbon footprint of heavy packaging is not, in any case, distracting the wine industry's attention from some of its other environmentally-unfriendly activities.
Despite the constraints of the war with Russia, Drinks+ is helping to shine a spotlight on the best wine tourism initiatives in East Europe and beyond.
Why doing a survey on wine tourism and sustainability? Both topics have a huge economic importance and both have further potential. Wine tourism is a fast-growing market. Sustainability is one of the challenges we need to solve most urgently. In a joint study, Prof. Dr. Gergely Szolnoki, Dr. Maximilian Tafel and Anne-Christin Stelter (Hochschule Geisenheim University) as well as Niklas Ridoff and Calle Nilsson (WineTourism.com) bring these two aspects together and asked how to implement sustainable wine tourism successfully.
Tradition demands the participation of individuals who are dedicated to preserving it. For the Trentino winegrowers’ cooperative Mezzacorona, this involves safeguarding the indigenous grape varieties Teroldego and Marzemino, showcasing their qualities both as monovarietal wines and in blends.
