We were sitting on the terrace at Nelion Winery, perched on the famous Paphos-Troodos road, talking with winemaker Marinos Ioannou and tasting his excellent wines. (We loved a dry red made from the indigenous Ofthalmo grape variety and brought home a bottle to share with friends here).

A Happening Place

Nelion was kind of a happening place while we were there. Lots of traffic, lots of visitors. This is not an accident. The Paphos-Troodos road draws many visitors who come to Cyprus and want to see the signature sights of the island.

Nelion provides a range of experiences for them.  You can taste 3 wines for free or all 9 wines at the bar for €5 per person. Ten euro per head will get you a seated 9-wine tasting on the terrace with cheese and salami and €15 buys a winery and vineyard tour plus the terrace tasting and snack plate.

Tourists are critically important to the winery, which produces around 25,000 bottles each year and sells most of them at the cellar door during the tourist season, supplementing this with bulk wine sales to local residents during the off-season.

We heard lots of languages and accents — British, Russian, Israeli, French — and saw lots of wine go out of the tasting room into waiting cars. Marinos had been in the audience when I spoke at the wine symposium earlier in the week and it is clear that he already understood why I stressed wine tourism as an industry strategy.

No Wine Tourists Here?

So I was more than surprised when he brought up the topic and said in a matter-of-fact way that there are no wine tourists in Cyprus.

No wine tourists? What about all these people who come here and taste and buy your wine? They are tourists, most of them, but they aren’t wine tourists. And he was right.

So what is a wine tourist?

I often talk about wine tourism in the Napa Valley, where it is a booming industry, and I think the term applies pretty well to what is going on there. Most of the tourists are drawn there by the wine, although maybe it would be better to say that they are wine lifestyle tourists, since wine and winery are not the only parts of the package on offer in the Napa Valley.

In many places including Cyprus, what we think of as wine tourists are really tourists of a different stripe who take advantage of the opportunity to visit a winery and perhaps buy some wine as a sidebar to their main tourist focus. For these visitors, wine tourism is an alternative to the main agenda– something to do when rainy weather keeps you off the beach — or an attractive bonus stop on the road to Troodos, for example.

Can Wine Compete?

Cyprus has lots of tourists — I think it is the island’s most important industry now — and has developed several wine routes to help tourists find their way around.  But as Marinos noted, real wine tourists are still few and far between. What needs to happen to change this?

At first glance it is difficult to imagine how wine can compete for tourists in Cyprus. Cyprus has important historical sites and a deep and attractive culture. Cyprus is a playground, with beaches and mountains to enjoy. Cyprus has wonderful food, with many regional specialties. Cyprus was great weather, which attracts European tri-athletes who want get a jump-start on training.  How in the world can wine compete?

Easier Said Than Done

The answer, as you have probably already guessed, is not to compete but to cooperate. Wine is part of Cyprus’s long history, a key component of its culture, and a perfect match for the great food. The key, as work done by the United Nations World Tourism Organization has stressed, is to bring these threads together with wine at the center.

This is not necessarily an easy task. Wine producers in Cyprus struggle at times to work together to promote their national “brand,” so expanding cooperation to include museums, archaeological sites, restaurants, hotels, national and regional tourist agencies and so forth is easier said than done. Creative use of the wine route concept, linking it to other regional structures, may be a good way to begin.

Nelion winery has made a modest start to this. The tasting room is also a sales room for a variety of local foods and some craft items. This shows the winery as embedded in the local community, with its food, culture, and beautiful landscape.

Fostering real wine tourism is not a Cypriot problem — it is everyone’s problem. Everyone who wants to see wine tourism prosper and achieve its great potential to develop wine, wineries, and wine regions has an interest in converting tourists who stop at wineries into wine tourists.

>>><<<

This is the final column in our series on wine and wine tourism in Cyprus. Sue and I would like to thank once again the Cyprus Tourism Organization for inviting us to attend the Cyprus Wine Competition, to visit wineries, taste the wines, and meet such interesting people. Thanks to you all!