ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contribute to the existing literature by examining wine tourism as a cultural practice in Japan, a context without an established tradition of wine culture. It shows that wine tourism is constructed in Japan by local actors who actively adopt concepts and practices from the global wine world to their local contexts to address the needs of the local society. The development of wine tourism is by no means an isolated phenomenon. It is a measure that local actors take to cope with social changes in rural Japan. The chapter discusses the ‘worlds approach’ as a conceptual tool to understand gastronomic tourism, focusing on a specific case of wine tourism in Japan. Wine tourism is a way to participate in the global wine world, by being exposed to a set of meanings associated with gastronomic tourism and cosmopolitan cultural activities usually associated with western countries.
