Wine Day - The Open Cellars Day
It is a project that was firstly presented in 1993 in Italy under the patronage of the association Movimento per il turismo del vino (Movement for the wine tourism); with its site in Montalcino (Tuscany). The day of celebrating the world’s wine day changes every year but it’s always on the last Sunday in May.
The initiative was launched because no one of the responsible persons or institutions in wine tourism recognized the great potential that was delineating. Apart few exceptions, most of the wine cellars in Italy weren’t accessible to tourists. Today, the President of the Association says; Nobody believed in the Wine day project, so only the Tuscan vintners joined, mostly for friendly reasons, and not because they really believed that it was a potentially worthily project. In the contrary, already in the first year a great affluence of visitors was registered to almost one hundred vintners that joined the initiative.
In 1994, the second year more than 500 vintners from 14 Italian regions joined the project to reach an affluence of over 150.000 lovers of the noble drops. Amongst the strong presence of the Tuscan vintners, the greatest improvement was made by the regions Friuli Venezia Giulia and Trentino Alto Adige which attracted almost one third of the above mentioned number of visitors. In 1995 the project was joined by Sonoma Valley – California, the company Suntory with its properties in Japan; province Yamanashi (eastern of Tokyo), Stellenbosch (South Africa), Conarwarra in Australia, Mendoza in Argentina and some regions in Chile and Uruguay.
Goriška brda (Slovenia) and Istria (Croatia) joined the project in 1999 for the first time when the whole project reached over 1.000 wine cellars in the world. After the successful first edition in 1999 with 37 wine cellars and about 800 visitors, during the last edition there were 90 wine cellars that registered an affluence of over 15.000 visitors.
The project aims to conjure up the story of family traditions, of vineyards and locations, of cultivated varieties, to narrate about the gastronomy, the culture and the most important tourist information to the surrounding regions.
