Wine, Heritagization and its Discontents: Landscape, Identity and Environment in Italy

This book examines wine heritagization as a complex territorial process through which wine-producing regions, landscapes, practices, and identities are selected, represented, and transformed into heritage. Drawing on Italian case studies, the book critically investigates the environmental, economic, social, and institutional consequences of this process for local communities and production systems. Rather than treating heritage as a neutral form of preservation, the chapters analyse how wine heritagization reshapes landscapes, influences tourism development, modifies administrative arrangements, and affects relations between producers, residents, institutions, and markets. Particular attention is devoted to the tensions generated by globalization, territorial branding, economic specialization, land-use change, forest loss, and the growing dependence of wine regions on tourism and symbolic consumption. By addressing these dynamics at multiple geographical scales, the collection asks who benefits, who is marginalized, and what forms of environmental and social transformation are produced when wine becomes territorial heritage.