Marketing Wine Tourism in Europe: Key Levers from a Literature Review on Italy, France, Spain, and Germany

Design/Methodology/Approach: A systematic and partly bibliometric literature review was operated on wine tourism in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany, in the period from 2010 to 2020, with data collection based on a survey on Google Scholar. A following affinity analysis was carried out on the resulted 51 documents. Purpose: The study aims to detect the emerging topics about wine tourism in the countries under investigation, whose selection was due to their relevance in terms of wine production, to determine the potential marketing issues by which empowering the recovery and the relaunch of wine tourism during and / or after the Covid-19 pandemic. Findings: Analysis of the data shows six emerging topics, namely tourism management, service management, stakeholder management, sales management, consumer / tourist behavior, and rural development and branding. These topics can be associated, for potential affinity, with three fundamental marketing issues, such as marketing management, consumer marketing, and territory / territorial marketing. Originality/value: In the overall scarcity of systematic literature reviews on wine tourism, which seem limited to few investigations, this study is the first to propose a specific focus on Italy, France, Spain, and Germany, i.e., the largest wine producing countries in Europe. The results of the survey have been catalogued firstly as emerging topics, and secondly as scientific issues, to emphasize the potential key levers for wine tourism growth and development, most of all considering the pandemic crisis.