An interview with Dr Robin Back, Assistant Professor at the Rosen College of Hospitality Management, University of Central Florida.
Tell me about your background and how you got interested in this subject.
You may have heard of the Back family from South Africa – my cousin Charles owns Fairview and Spice Route and for about 12 years I represented his wines in North America. I always knew that at some point I would hit a brick wall from too much travelling and waking up in a different hotel room every morning. I hit that brick wall in 2011 and thought, what am I going to do next? I guess it was time for my mid life crisis and I thought the part of my job that I enjoyed the most was the educational part plus I’ve always enjoyed research, so I decided to take the masochistic decision to go back to university and do a PhD in Management. I obtained that a year ago and took a faculty position at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, at the Rosen College of Hospitality Management, the second largest hospitality college in the world. So I now teach wine and spirits and my research stream is mainly wine tourism.
Do most people go wine touring as their main objective, or is wine touring a side event to their main travels?
I think it depends on two things: On your definition of ‘wine tourism’ and on the individual and what their interests are. One of the things we see is that there are numerous definitions of wine tourism and no consensus on what constitutes wine tourism. Last month I attended the UNTWO’s First Global Conference on Wine Tourism in Georgia, and one of the things that surprised me is that it didn’t start by defining wine tourism. After the conference the Georgia Declaration on Wine Tourism was issued, and still didn’t define wine tourism specifically but referred to it as a crucial component of gastronomy tourism.
To me wine tourism usually takes place in a wine region, with wine being the central draw, but it’s not necessarily – wine tourism can take place in a non-wine region, such as one holding a large food and wine festival.
There are various definitions of wine tourism, one of the most comprehensive being “visitations to vineyards, wineries, wine festivals, and wine shows for which grape wine tasting and/or experiencing the attributes of a grape wine region are the prime motivating factors for visitors” (Hall, Sharples, Cambourn & Macionis, 2000).What we usually understand by wine tourism is that it takes place in a wine region and involves wine, but a number of studies have shown that wine tourists desire more from the experience than just wine. They also desire good food, an experiential and educational opportunity, and to experience a beautiful rural landscape as well as various other activities. Good wine usually goes hand in hand with good food and wine tends to be produced in beautiful areas.
You do get wine aficionados who want to go to different regions, be educated about them, and the main draw is the wine, but I think that’s a smaller group than people who desire to tour a beautiful rural region that includes wine. A number of wine regions are in close proximity in major cities as well, such as Napa and Sonoma, making them easily accessible to tourists.
Can the winery itself be a big draw, or is it the region that’s the draw?
This goes back to cluster theory where a cluster of like businesses is going to be more of a draw than an individual one. It’s why we have groupings like wine routes where people spend a day on a wine route stopping off at wineries, restaurants and other activities. People usually want something more than a single winery. If an individual winery is going to be a draw in its own right, it’s going to have something that makes it a destination. A lot of wineries offer more than just wines, such as in South Africa where they may offer cheese, olive oil, cooking courses, chocolate, restaurants, game drives, delis, accommodation, botanical gardens, etc., there are all sorts of different activities they offer, so someone may go to an individual winery and not necessarily need to go anywhere else. A winery that offers multiple activities may become a destination in its own right.
It also depends on whom you’re trying to attract. I was in Bordeaux over the summer and went to some of the top chateaux which tend to be appointment only and it’s just about wine and nothing else, and I said you’re not really trying to develop wine tourism are you? They said, “We’re fully booked every day,” but they’re fully booked taking one small group at a time, and they consider their business to be selling wine and not tourism. So it depends on whether you’re purely in the wine business and the hosting of visitors is simply a marketing opportunity to sell wine or whether you’re in the wine and the tourism business, or you’re really in the tourism business and using wine as the draw. In Taiwan after the earthquake a number of farms that had orchards were devastated so the government sponsored the development of wineries as a tourist activity to regenerate these areas economically in a place where there had previously been no wine production.
Near Orlando, Florida they’re building a winery, mainly fruit wines, but are putting in seven acres of gardens and will offer a farm-to-bottle wine experience. This is not a wine region, so it is purely a tourism enterprise, where wine is the context for the tourism, but these are the exceptions.
If wine becomes entertainment like this, could it draw tourists away from actual wineries and actual regions?
I think it could be beneficial. Your real wine aficionados aren’t going to want to taste blueberry wine in Orlando, but there will be people who visit a winery in a non-traditional wine area and find it fun and educational and decide that maybe they should think about visiting an actual wine region.
Are you seeing wine tourism developing in the Old World?
I am seeing less change in the Old World, because the wineries tend to be just about the wine, but tourism is developing in the surrounding villages.
Look at a country like Georgia, which has been coming out of years of stagnation of its wine industry making a concerted effort to develop wine tourism. As the “cradle of wine” claiming over 8,000 vintages, they realise it has the potential to be a great draw.
What's the future of wine tourism?
It’s really about the importance that’s now being attached to wine tourism globally, with many wine tourism conferences taking place around the world and wine tourism frameworks being developed. It’s also seen as a way of developing rural areas in need of economic development. Wine tourism is considered an indispensible part of gastronomy tourism, and we’re seeing this link between wine tourism and food tourism, as the two are so closely connected.
Wine tourism falls under so many umbrellas. It’s a form of consumer experience tourism, where visitors experience a product in its brand home, and includes factory and brewery visitation. It’s also a form of rural tourism, agritourism, gastronomy/culinary tourism, it falls under so many different tourism umbrellas that I see it becoming a more and more integral part of tourism products more generally.
Dr Robin Back will be speaking at the inaugural Business of Food and Wine tourism conference, at Stellenbosch in South Africa on 1 and 2 November 2016. For more information about the conference, visit www.wineandfood.co.za.