WTI Magazine #28    2014 May, 1
Author : buonenotizie.it      Translation by:

Speaking of wine tourism, today, is tantamount to reinvent the wheel. As for wines, Italy is an extraordinary repository of wealth and mobilizes crowds of tourists every year. Yet there is always something new to discover: for example, the intelligent formula which in Salento prepares to decline wine tourism in a new kind of trip, either helpful to tourists and to the territory.

This is called "experiential tourism" an unprecedented proposal that invites the visitor to participate directly in some stages of harvesting, stripping the role of spectator and external user to directly enter in medias res, that is, in a direct and visceral relationship with what Edmondo De Amicis called "the second blood of the human race".

"With its vast expanses of vineyards, is in September that Guagnano becomes a territory able to give great emotions" says the mayor of Guagnano Fernando Leone. "In the vineyards from the early hours of dawn, the party begins. Loaded with grapes, small three wheelers go through the country lanes to get into the cellars, where the dark Negroamaro grapes are unloaded as a waterfall. It's a party, with an intense aroma of grapes and wine everywhere". An bucolic overview straight from the world of wine: the real one, made out of hard work, sweat but also rare and precious conviviality. And it is precisely this conviviality that tourists will be invited to sample in September, in a trip through the lands of Negroamaro that participants will live in the key of "actors".

At the heart of the initiative - designed by Carmen Mancarella - there is the town of Guagnano: a town surrounded by vineyards, where in two weeks in September (from 6 to 13 and from 18 to 21) the tourists will be able to visit the area, the cellars and participate in the harvest according to an unpublished night and day formula: in Castello Monaci, in fact, the harvest will be even at night, using a method that - apart from the mere tourist attraction - was also used in the past to prevent fermentation during the transport of clusters, while allowing to save electricity during the cooling process of the grapes before pressing.

Then, what is offered is a trip which proposes in the most fertile wine industry what actually has already been happening in the branch of the olive harvest: many are the Swedes and tourists from Northern Europe who come to Italy to participate in the olives collection and then return to Scandinavia with their jar of oil, rigorously home made. For Salento, therefore, the harvest for tourists could really turn into a magic formula, useful not only to travelers but also - and especially – to the territory.

Promoting the development of experiential tourism, Salento actually means on the one hand to push in the direction of the seasonal adjustment of tourist flows, and on the other hand to offer new job opportunities that depart directly from the territory and a renewed relationship with the earth. It is, in fact, about increasing the arising of a new approach to agriculture by encouraging young people to think (or rather, re-think) it in modern terms: as a company.

Creating a link between agriculture and tourism, therefore, can give new and increasingly vital responses to the crisis. Utopia? Quite the contrary, according to the data. It appears that in the Universities of Puglia, the inscriptions to the faculties of agriculture have increased by forty percent: a wise choice, if you think that after the degree the eighty percent of graduates are able to find a job.