Understanding the Wine Tourism Experience for Winery Visitors in the Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada

This paper focuses on the intersection between agriculture and tourism in which production and consumption come together in the form of wine tourism. Wine tourism is an experience which can be conceptualized at different geographical scales and which involves visitor perceptions of physical landscapes and built environment, as well as human interactions. Survey research in Niagara, Ontario wineries is used to provide a general profile of visitors to the winery region and to examine visitor assessment of the wine tourism experience from both a human service quality and an environmental contextual perspective. Overall, the rural landscape is found to be highly important in visitor enjoyment of the wine tourism experience. Niagara is a region of rapid wine tourism growth and this study raises issues in terms of the symbiosis between wineries and tourists and the quality of the wine tourism experience.