A Countryside to Sip: Venice Inland and the Prosecco’s Uneasy Relationship with Wine Tourism and Rural Exploitation

Abstract

In 2016, Italian production of wine exceeded 51 million hectolitres and among the twenty regions, the region with the most production by volume (millions of hectolitres) was the Veneto region, northeast of Italy, with almost 11 million. In particular, the success of Prosecco at the global level is the most important driving factor at both the economic and productivity levels. The worldwide success of Prosecco wine entails a remarkable change in both the local and regional configuration of agrarian landscapes. Traditional winegrowing swiftly changed into an intensive monoculture with remarkable investments and the spread of new viticulture entrepreneurships. The discussion proposed here intends to investigate the process of heritage construction or 'heritagisation', UNESCO candidacy, as an important issue for rural tourism promotion in the context of a productive winescape. We concentrated our analysis on the DOCG area, a complex space where several forces need to coexist; the productive drive of growing requests (global and local) of Prosecco, as well as rural representation based on local habits and a concrete hilly landscape. Rural tourism is clearly an important sector in terms of revenue and employment, especially for local communities, and it can help to ensure economic stability; however, doing so in a way that benefits the area and the landscape is not so straightforward. There are potential problems in facilitating increased urbanization, such as the standardization of landscape and damage to the area if plans are mismanaged. In the case of best practices, a desirable model of tourism can be tapped into while helping rural regions take advantage of more sustainable tourism development and landscape management.

Historic Rural Landscapes: Sustainable Planning Strategies and Action Criteria. The Italian Experience in the Global and European Context

“…Such a specularity is more apparent for those typical products which get their identity from the relationship with regional landscapes, product history, local traditions and community knowledge. For such products as wine, olive oil, bread and cheese the historic rural landscapes related to them assume an extreme importance as: a specific content of the product's marketing image; a medium communicating products identity; a tourism attractor which can support recreational and cultural activities, some based on thematic eno-gastronomic cultural routes and so forth [87,88].…”

Estimation of potential soil erosion in the Prosecco DOCG area (NE Italy), toward a soil footprint of bottled sparkling wine production in different land-management scenarios

“…In 2017, the Prosecco DOCG growing area was officially enrolled in the tentative list the for the UNESCO World Heritage status [32,36]. However, the UNESCO candidacy was criticized both at academic and at civil society levels due weaknesses in terms of the socio-environmental unsustainability of Prosecco farming system [34].…”

“…The Prosecco DOCG vineyards increased from some 4,000 ha in 2000 to 5,700 ha in 2010, and well beyond 7,000 ha officially declared in 2016 [34,36–38]. In the annual report of Consortium Conegliano-Valdobbiadene District in just four years (2013–2016) more than 1,000 ha of land were converted to productive vineyards [39–42].…”

“…In such viticultural production context, the economic and production factors are driving drastic changes in land use, undermining an ecosystem stability based on soil system, and fueling the debate about the sustainability of vineyards cropland [34–36,45]. Moreover, the rapid expansion of new vineyards and unsustainable intensification of agricultural practices are triggering several territorial conflicts in the Prosecco DOCG area [46].…”

“…The study area is geographically defined by the Prosecco DOCG wine production region, which spans 215 km 2 in the North-East sector of Italy (Province of Treviso), and it encompasses fifteen small-medium Municipalities, in a scattered urban-agricultural territorial matrix [34,35]. Vineyard cropland presently occupies the 32% of the DOCG area, representing one of most diffuse cultivation (Figs 1a and 2).…”