From Sustainability to Regeneration

This chapter focuses on sustainability challenges in the wine industry from a tourism perspective. Wine tourism is considered an important, growing segment of the tourism sector and is a well-developed practice in many international wine-producing regions, but it comes with significant cultural, social, and environmental impacts including tourism's significant contribution to climate change and damage from overtourism. Sustainable tourism has attempted to address these issues, but serious concerns persist. The COVID-19 pandemic was an opportunity to revisit tourism's purpose and consider alternative models and approaches that better respect ecological limits and better support human flourishing. New approaches to wine tourism that go beyond sustaining tourism or minimizing tourism's negative effects are expanding. These regenerative approaches highlight wine tourism's potential to generate economic, social, cultural, and environmental benefits.