Wine Tourism and Regional Economic Development: Of Mimesis and Business Models

At less than twenty-five years old, the emerging cool-climate wine region in Nova Scotia is Canada’s newest wine-producing province. Along with the rapid growth in the grape and wine sector—from three to more than twenty wineries—Nova Scotia has seen a similar increase in tourist activities associated with wine. As found elsewhere around the globe, the demographics within the province have shifted during this same period. The region has seen both population and economic decline in the rural areas as people and businesses increasingly concentrate on the major urban centre of the province. For decades, governments have been trying to mitigate the adverse economic impacts of this trend by investing in rural tourism development. Recently, there has been a focus on increasing wine tourism in parallel with the development of the grape and wine sector. However, the nature of the wine tourism businesses that have emerged in the province is not necessarily easily amenable to copying and transporting to other rural areas. We show that the success of rural tourism development is predicated on developing the robust, situated actor-networks needed to enact a business model. Therefore, there is a danger in any approach that attempts to simply transport the business model—without consideration of the way it is enacted by an actor-network comprised of persons, place(s), and things.