Innovative sustainable development policies and strategies for the effective safeguarding and innovative enhancement of European “UNESCO World heritage” wine growing landscapes
The VITOUR LANDSCAPE Project is a result of the first common analysis work done by 6 of the actual 10 project partners from Italy, Austria, France, Hungary, Germany and Portugal under the project VITOUR (INTERREG III C 2005-2007). At the end of that project, the partners prepared a common "International Convention on World Heritage Vineyards", where they agree on preservation and enhancement of their highly valuable cultural wine growing landscape, for a sustainable development of the whole areas, and to do is also through "capitalisation on good practices". After 2 planning meetings in 2008 (after VITOUR I) they decided together with 4 other UNESCO world heritage wine growing areas (from P - Pico island, I - Montalcino/Orcia Valley, A - Wachau and CH - Lavaux) to present a new INTERREG IVC project to improve and innovate local and regional policies for cultural landscape preservation and enhancement in these European UNESCO World Heritage wine growing areas. With this purpose the
VITOUR LANDSCAPE Project partners will focus during the first 20 months, with 11 technical seminars in each partner area on the exchange, description and analysis of good practices in various fileds of interest for the global theme "landscape preservation and enhancement". All contents of these seminars will be published online and enriched also with good practices from other wine growing areas worldwide, which want to participate to the "VITOUR AWARDS" for successful landscape preservation projects (granting in Sept. 2012 in Salone del Gusto/Turin). Then, starting from July 2011, the partners will verify locally/regionally the feasibility of transferring selected good practices to their areas, with studies, analyses and participatory planning processes, where at the end at least 5 partners will provide for the first tools for a concrete and effective good practice transfer to their areas.
Contemporarily, based on the good practices exchanged and influenced also by the results of
regional feasibility verification studies or initiatives, the partners will elaborate together (and with the help of experts) European Guidelines for wine growing cultural landscape preservation and enhancement, with special regards to endangered areas and vineyards.
All results of common exchanges and studies will also be disseminated online, through press releases, e-newsletters, in local events, as well as during the participation to 2 international events (EUROGUSTO and SALONE DEL GUSTO) and organising a Final Conference on sustainable development and landscape preservation in the in Italy, in July 2012. Additionally, an interactive web 2.0 blog for visual enhancement of the partner areas' landscape ("MY VITOUR"), will help to involve inhabitants, web-users and visitors and raise their awareness for the values to be preserved.