Potential frontiers of wine tourism marketing in the main countries of the old world of wine

A systematic and partly bibliometric literature review was operated about wine tourism in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany, main players in the Old World of Wine, in the period from 2010 to 2020, extracting the related data from Google Scholar; a following affinity analysis was implemented on the 51 documents of interest. The study aims to detect the emerging topics about wine tourism in the countries under investigation, selected because of their relevance in terms of wine production, to determine the potential marketing issues for recovering and relaunching wine tourism during and / or after the COVID-19 pandemic. The data analysis shows at least 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. 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, universally known as the Old World of Wine. 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.