Wine tourism in Italy vs. US

Before the GSB, I was fortunate enough to spend a year living in Rome. I fell in love with wine tasting in Italy as a way to familiarize myself with the food, history and culture of a region. While each experience was unique, I noted a common theme. Compared with Napa / Sonoma, which was always swarmed with tour buses and seemed to have a formula for getting visitors in and out the door, Italy struck me as comically underprepared for wine tourism at scale. Wineries in Umbria expressed bemusement when we said we would like to visit the winery and try the wine, and indifference when we tried to purchase it. At some of the finest Barolo wineries in the world, we were treated to hour-long personal tastings and tours of the vineyards and facilities (and trust when I say we did not buy enough wine to warrant their time).  Even Tuscany, which seemed the most equipped to receive visitors at scale, invested a huge amount in the visitor experience.

These experiences (and the differences I perceived between wine tourism in the US and Italy) inspired my interest in this class. I hope I will come out of it with a more nuanced perspective on how wine producers choose to interact with their customers, and what this means for their brands.