WTI Magazine #44    2014 October, 1
Author : buonenotizie.it      Translation by:

Harvest time is approaching with great strides. Wine tourism in Italy is booming and is able to innovate with new proposals: for example, Salento is preparing to decline it with a smart formula, a new trip type, both useful to the tourist and the local area.

This is the so-called "experiential tourism": a novel proposal that invites the visitor to directly participate in some stages of harvesting, leaving the role of mere spectator and external user to directly enter "in medias res", which means in a direct and visceral relation with what Edmondo De Amicis called "the second blood of the human race".

"With its vast expanses of vineyards, in Autumn Guagnano becomes a territory capable of giving great emotions" says the mayor of Guagnano Fernando Leone. "From the early hours of dawn, in the vineyards it's a party. Loads of grapes, small three wheelers come across country lanes to arrive to the cellars, where the brown of Negroamaro grapes are downloaded as a waterfall. It's a party, with everywhere an intense aroma of grapes and wine". A bucolic overview, live from the world of wine: the real one, made of hard work, sweat but also rare and precious conviviality. And it is precisely this conviviality that tourists will be invited to sample in Autumn, a trip through the lands of Negroamaro that participants will live as "actors".

At the heart of the initiative - designed by Carmen Mancarella – is the town of Guagnano: a country surrounded by vineyards where tourists will be able to visit the area, the wineries and to participate in the harvest, according to a new night and day formula. At Castello Monaci, in fact, the harvest will be even at night, using a formula that - apart from being a tourist attraction - was also used in the past to prevent fermentation during the transport of the clusters, at the same time allowing to save electricity during the cooling procedure that precedes the pressing of the grapes.

What is offered, then, is a trip which proposes in the wine industry what in fact has already been happening for a few years the branch of the olive harvest: there are in fact many tourists who come to Italy to participate in the olives collection and then return home with their own jar of oil, strictly 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 for Salento actually means on the one hand to push in the direction of the seasonal adjustment of tourism flows, and on the other hand to offer new job opportunities directly coming from the territory. The emergence of a new approach to agriculture is increasing, by encouraging young people to think it (or rather, re-think it) in modern terms, that is as a business sector.

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