With this editorial, we are pleased to present the Special Issue of the International Journal of Wine Business Research (IJWBR) “Ever-evolving experiences in innovative and sustainable wine systems: the perspective of wine tourism and hospitality”.
This Special Issue was inspired by the 15th Conference of the Academy of Wine Business Research (AWBR), which we had the honour of co-chairing in July 2024 at the Department of Management of the University of Verona (Italy). The central theme of the conference – the evolution of contemporary wine systems – sparked numerous contributions and debates on how innovation, sustainability and the diversification of wine experiences shape the ongoing development of wine systems worldwide. This Special Issue aims to continue the discussion with a selection of papers that advance knowledge in the fields of wine tourism and hospitality.
We would like to express our gratitude to Professor Johan Bruwer for accepting our proposal to publish this Special Issue on the IJWBR. This has strengthened the partnership between the journal and the AWBR. The AWBR’s mission is to share ideas, research findings and collaborations among wine academics and the broader wine industry. Through this partnership, the IJWBR is undoubtedly the premier forum for the AWBR for disseminating business research to a broad audience of scholars and professionals. Now that one of the guest editors of this Special Issue serves as the journal’s editor-in-chief, her intention is that the journal’s pages will host further special issues in the future, with the privilege of collecting the study advancements of the AWBR community and facilitating networking among scholars also in between conferences.
This Special Issue collects 11 papers [1] that, with both theoretical and empirical approaches, have the potential to stimulate new discussions around the crucial role of wine tourism and hospitality in creating customer experiences and developing trajectories of innovation and sustainability. We believe that each of the papers brings a valuable piece of knowledge to the complex puzzle of contemporary wine systems worldwide, as they deepen diverse yet interconnected perspectives on several key issues. In particular, they explore:
customer response and emotions in wine tourism activities and communication (d’Ament et al., 2025; Santos et al., 2025);
the understanding of wine experiences through the academic literature analysis (Shankar and Suresh, 2025);
the nexus between restaurant offering, wine supply and pricing (Corsi et al., 2025);
the orientations of wineries in terms of sustainability (Morandi and Zinno, 2025), in building competitive advantage based on wine tourism (Martínez-Falcó et al., 2025) and in the digital transformation of the wine supply chain (Lichtmannecker and Hohnhorst, 2025); and
the development of wine systems in managing the environmental impacts of wine tourism (Boudzine Chameeva et al., 2025), forecasting wine tourism (Kunc, 2025), fostering resilience of wine regions facing extreme events (Woodfield and Rasmussen, 2025) and educating future wine tourism professionals (Alebaki et al., 2025).
To guide to a deeper engagement with the papers, we introduce below their key research findings and insights into the theme of this Special Issue.
Genevieve d’Ament, Tahmid Nayeem and Anthony Saliba explore the cellar door experience in Australia in their study “Maximising sales and fostering brand attachment: The power of great expectations in the Australian cellar door experience”. Their analysis based on the Bayesian Networks approach reveals that exceeding consumer expectations is central to visitor purchase and loyalty behaviours, with individual mood and personality acting as moderating influences. They confirm the centrality of experiential design and staff training in increasing brand attachment and maximising sales (d’Ament et al., 2025).
Complementing the psychological approach, the paper “Neural signatures in wine tourism advertising: images of cellars versus vineyards”, written by Isabel M. Santos, Pedro Bem-Haja, Diana Cunha, André Silva and Elisabeth Kastenholz, adopts an innovative neuroscientific framework to advertising evaluation, examining the different neural responses to images of wine cellars and vineyards. Their findings show that vineyard imagery elicits greater attentional salience and memorability than cellar imagery, highlighting the potential for landscape-oriented communication strategies in wine tourism marketing (Santos et al., 2025). The study demonstrates the contribution of neuroscientific tools to the design of effective promotional content.
By applying a bibliometric analysis to several studies published in the past two decades on experiences in wine tourism and hospitality, Nithya Shankar and Sukruth Suresh in their study “Promoting Experiences in Wine Tourism and Hospitality: Setting A Research Agenda” explore the opportunities to expand knowledge in this field considering the development of the demand, of business practices and of technology. Specifically, the authors identify key avenues for both future academic research and the development of wine professional practice in the areas of social media management, influencer marketing, virtual reality, big data analytics, sustainable tourism models, and inclusive wine tourism (Shankar and Suresh, 2025).
The study “The Star Wars of Michelin Guide restaurants: a wine list perspective – a case study from Italy”, by Stefano Corsi, Riccardo Saracino and Chiara Mazzocchi, shifts the attention to the hospitality sector analysing, through the application of an econometric model, the relationship between restaurant attributes, wine list composition, wine pricing, consumer ratings and Michelin Guide scores in Italian restaurants. The results show that wine pricing strategies and the balance between local and international offerings can significantly influence consumer ratings (Corsi et al., 2025). This paper offers new insights into the interplay between hospitality, high-end dining and wine experience.
Focusing on the business perspective, the study “Sustainable Practices in the Wine Sector: Firm Perspectives and Actions” by Sonia Morandi and Iacopo Zinno deepens the knowledge about the perception of Italian wineries for the different dimensions of sustainability. The originality of this work lies in examining business perceptions, using primary data collected from 130 Italian wineries, not only in terms of what they think about sustainability, and what they actually do, but also in terms of what they believe consumers are interested in. While wineries tend to equate sustainability with environmental measures, their actions in the social sphere are concrete, although not fully recognised. Overcoming persistent barriers such as certification costs, financial constraints and limited expertise and improving communication with customers, are suggested as key development issues (Morandi and Zinno, 2025).
Javier Martínez-Falcó, Eduardo Sánchez-García, Bartolomé Marco-Lajara and Luis A. Millán-Tudela, with the study “Wine tourism as a catalyst for sustainable competitive advantage: unraveling the role of winery image and reputation”, provide empirical evidence on how wine tourism development fosters sustainable competitive advantage. Using partial least squares structural equation modelling on information collected from a sample of 207 Spanish wineries, the authors reveal the positive mediating effect of winery image and reputation in the linkage between the development of wine tourism and business competitive advantage (Martínez-Falcó et al., 2025). These findings highlight the strategic importance of wine tourism as a driver of long-term competitiveness and as a means of building business reputation.
The digital transformation is the subject of interest for Sara Lichtmannecker and Valentin Hohnhorst in their study “Intersecting the Confluence of Tradition and Transformation: How Digital Transformation changes the Wine Experience along the German Wine Value Chain”. They investigate the effects of digital transformation in the German wine value chain, which remains largely rooted in a traditional wine-growing industry. They conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 experts across different stages of the wine value chain to explore how digital technologies are significantly reshaping the industry. In particular, the study highlights the transformative potential of digital technologies in enhancing customer engagement through new “Digital Wine Experiences”, and, at the same time, introducing innovative business models, combined with the application of traditional wine-producing practices, bringing out the archetype of the “Digital Artisan Wine Entrepreneur” (Lichtmannecker and Hohnhorst, 2025).
Tatiana Bouzdine Chameeva, Anicia Jaegler and Javiera Rojas Barrios, in the article “From Vine to Glass: Navigating the Carbon Footprint of Wine Tourism”, offer an original contribution with an attempt to determine the environmental impact of wine tourism. They estimate the carbon footprint of wine tourism in the Bordeaux region, France, using secondary data sourced from various local tourist bodies and databases. They calculate that each visitor produces approximately 39 kg of CO2e annually, determining that car travel and hotel stays are the primary sources of carbon emissions (Boudzine Chameeva et al., 2025). This study highlights the contemporary challenge wine-growing regions face in balancing economic vitality driven by wine tourism activities with environmental protection, encouraging the promotion of sustainable practices in tourism and hospitality, such as low-carbon mobility, eco-friendly accommodation or digital optimisation.
Martin Kunc, in “Future avenues for development in forecasting wine tourism”, discusses modelling wine tourism forecasting. The study reviews recent literature on forecasting tourism and wine tourism. The author demonstrates that existing analyses are predominantly descriptive, whereas the integration of studies and predictive models, supported by artificial intelligence, simulations and other advanced tools, could provide enhanced information for winery managers when planning capacity and business investments in wine tourism (Kunc, 2025).
With their research “Weathering the Storm: Wine, Tourism, and Hospitality Resilience in the Face of Extreme Events”, Paul Woodfield and Erling Rasmussen address the vulnerability of wine tourism systems under climate shocks and crises, focusing on New Zealand’s Hawke’s Bay. By employing the Event System Theory, the study reveals that small-scale, family-run businesses are particularly vulnerable to risks associated with seasonality, employment precarity and inadequate training (Woodfield and Rasmussen, 2025). Organisational resilience, encompassing both infrastructure and human and social capital, emerges as a crucial factor in wine tourism development, underscoring the need for a systemic approach to ensure the future sustainability of wine-linked industries.
Maria Alebaki, Stella Kladou and Gergely Szolnoki focus on higher education for wine tourism professionals. In their contribution “Engaging stakeholders and communities in wine tourism education: Experiences from an international collaboration”, the authors emphasise the centrality of education in the development of wine tourism. Their international research, involving different stakeholders and local communities through a multi-step action-research process, confirms the need for holistic, interdisciplinary curricula that position education as a central mechanism for preparing professionals capable of navigating industry complexity (Alebaki et al., 2025). Tourism capacity building, sustainability-oriented practices and community engagement emerge as key factors in wine tourism education in this research.
Although addressing diverse aspects, these 11 studies converge in presenting a shared vision of contemporary wine systems, where wine tourism and hospitality emerge as a significant driver of development, implying the construction of new relationships among businesses, nature and society. This dynamic, however, results from the orchestration of multiple interrelated factors, including the adoption of sustainability- and innovation-oriented strategies, the design of new approaches and tools to enhance customer experiences, the collaboration among diverse stakeholders and the active engagement of local communities. The redefinition of professional roles, the strengthening of business resilience and forecasting and planning emerge as further strategic elements for the development of the wine tourism and hospitality industry.
To conclude, we would like to warmly thank the numerous participants of the 15th AWBR Conference who made the meeting a success, the authors who enthusiastically contributed to this Special Issue and the many reviewers who generously shared their time, expertise and insightful comments to ensure the quality of this publication.
This Special Issue would not have been possible without the collective dedication and effort of this vibrant community of scholars.
Note
This Special Issue was also made open to other authors not attending the conference conducting research on the selected theme.
