How about a top-up?

When you've seen one, you've seen them all. That is the un­gen­er­ous thought that often creeps into my mind on those oc­ca­sions when I've found my­self being led around a win­ery. Vis­it­ing a wine grower in your free time is ob­vi­ously some­thing that is likely to ap­pear on any­one's hol­i­day to-do list, and it can be a life-saver if you have to keep for­eign vis­i­tors en­ter­tained for an ex­tended pe­riod.

As our ar­ti­cle on wine tourism start­ing on page 44 shows, Cat­alo­nia's wine sec­tor is big and var­ied enough to jus­tify its in­clu­sion among the many tourist op­por­tu­ni­ties the coun­try has to offer. The ar­ti­cle also con­tains good news for the sec­tor, in that the gov­ern­ment has a plan for turn­ing the in­dus­try into a top global tourist at­trac­tion. We will wait to see if the plan has any legs or whether it achieves its aims. From read­ing the ar­ti­cle, it sounds as if they are on the right track in bring­ing pro­duc­ers to­gether, im­prov­ing local trans­port, forg­ing con­tacts with coastal re­sorts, and so on. For the mo­ment, all we can do is con­grat­u­late them on the ini­tia­tive and wish them the best of luck.

I ac­tu­ally live in a wine pro­duc­ing zone and even a quick glance at the huge ex­panse of vine­yard all around and the pres­ence of winer­ies every few kilo­me­tres is tes­ta­ment to the im­por­tance of the in­dus­try for the whole area. There are a num­ber of such areas around the coun­try, and it can­not be doubted that the wine sec­tor is key to the econ­omy, whether in man­u­fac­tur­ing or tourism. These areas, whether it be Em­pordà, Penedès or Pri­o­rat, all offer tourist re­lated ac­tiv­i­ties, and in the past few years some com­pa­nies have made a real ef­fort to pro­vide unique and orig­i­nal ex­pe­ri­ences to their vis­i­tors.

How­ever, whether you are tour­ing the com­pany's vine­yards in a horse-drawn car­riage rather than on foot, or tak­ing a he­li­copter ride over the es­tate in­stead of look­ing out of the win­dow, they still boil down to a tour of the fa­cil­i­ties, ac­com­pa­nied by an ex­pla­na­tion of the wine-mak­ing process, fol­lowed by a quick tast­ing ses­sion and a visit to the gift shop. The first or even sec­ond visit to a win­ery is a new and in­for­ma­tive ex­pe­ri­ence, but after the fifth or sixth time, it starts to lose its lus­tre.

Clearly, a for­eign cou­ple vis­it­ing Cat­alo­nia for the first and only time in their lives will not visit six wine pro­duc­ers. How­ever, so much of the tourism in Cat­alo­nia in­cludes hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple who visit again and again. The British, the French, the Dutch, every year fill up the coun­try's camp­ing sites and ho­tels and surely the key is get­ting these peo­ple to go back to the winer­ies each time they come.

How to go about that is for­tu­nately not my job, but I do think that at least a part of the ef­fort to turn Cat­alo­nia's wine tourism sec­tor into a global leader needs to in­clude ini­tia­tives for en­cour­ag­ing re­turn vis­its. That might en­tail wine clubs or of­fer­ing ac­com­mo­da­tion as part of a pack­age. I'm sure there are hun­dreds of pos­si­bil­i­ties.

How­ever, I'll limit my un­qual­i­fied con­tri­bu­tion to a sin­gle re­flec­tion on wine tourism that I have no­ticed in my ex­pe­ri­ence. Peo­ple like wine, es­pe­cially when they're on hol­i­day and want to kick back and enjoy them­selves. How­ever, when­ever I have vis­ited a win­ery, the briefest part of the ex­pe­ri­ence is ac­tu­ally try­ing the prod­uct. Sure I want to see the vine­yards and of course I'm in­ter­ested in the process, but as a lay per­son I want the op­por­tu­nity to check out the prod­ucts. Heaven for­bid we end up with lines of drunken, singing Brits doing the conga down the cel­lar's aisles, but half a glass of cava and then being shoved into the gift shop is not going to cut it for me.