The Role of Wine Tourism in Italian SMEs’ Internationalization: Eight Cases

Abstract

Although several scholars have examined a possible relation between international tourism flow and international trade and confirmed that wine tourism creates marketing opportunities to sell products, most have carried out quantitative research. Therefore, there is a lack of exploratory and qualitative research. Moreover, it is also necessary to study why some wine producers internationalize suddenly after being local-market oriented for decades (become born-again globals/-internationals) and why they experience difficulties in internationalization as such firms have received less attention in internationalization literature. This study contributes toward closing these gaps and aims to examine the influence of international tourism on the internationalization process of Italian SMEs producing Bianchello del Metauro wine.