Chianti Experiences

Research project “Wine Experiences. Social mapping wine tourism” funded by the Great Wine Capitals Network in 2013.

The project investigates the transformation of traditional wine-producing areas in the age of globalisation in order to suggest innovative web-based approaches (specifically crowdsourcing) for exploring post-rural place identity, and for improving territorial marketing strategies in the broader context of regional planning. It focuses on the Chianti area, Tuscany.

By moving from the interpretation of post-modern place identity, the post-rural theory and the experiential marketing approach, the research suggests crowdsourcing provides useful tools to investigate the material and semiotic constitution of wine-producing areas, resulting from the encounter of heterogeneous actors; and to upgrade current experiential marketing trends, by turning wine-tourism areas into listening territories, able to provide adequate consideration for both transient and stable actors’ experiences. A sample implementation of crowdsourcing approach on the Chianti case is provided. It includes the design, realisation and experimenting of a dedicated multi-users geo-blog (based on social mapping); and some basic web-content analysis tools (i.e. IssueCrawler, web sites and blogs content analysis).