Guide Cantine d'Italia 2025 - The visit to the cellar the cost

These are numbers and data to investigate the choices and orientations of wineries from the north to the south of Italy, an increasingly topical theme for consumers.

After the positive experience of the 2024 edition, the new 2025 edition of the Guida Cantine d'Italia, presented in Milan on December 3, relaunches and strengthens the study on an increasingly interesting and worthy subject of investigation.

Let's write about the cost of visiting a winery. It represents an important piece of knowledge: all wineries, with a few exceptions, today indicate the costs for experiences to be carried out during a visit, taking for granted the fact that you enter the winery by paying for a service and no longer following spontaneous forms based on improvisation or free entry.

There was a long phase, in some ways even pioneering, in which, starting from the mid-90s, the concept of wine tourism gradually established itself; the practice of visiting a winery in that period was linked to occasional behaviors, based on spontaneity. With wineries that were not very organized in this regard and with wine enthusiasts who gradually grew in number and quality of behavior. Seeking the winery not only as an opportunity to purchase wine but as a

a place to look for a meeting with the winemaker, to receive elements of knowledge, to better understand where that wine was born that was tasted perhaps in the city, outside the environmental and social context in which the individual winery operates.

Go Wine, over 20 years ago, in the first phase of its activity, highlighted the need for this phenomenon to be gradually made more and more professional and structured; in this context, the payment for a service was a condition in some way necessary.

That is, visiting the cellar, as you visit (paying) a museum or a historical building in a wine territory; knowing beforehand the times and conditions and so as to be able to have an organized tourist experience.

The data we present demonstrate a complex situation that deserves more elements for reflection.

The price of the visit to the cellar has exceeded what was a sort of "entry threshold"; that is, a way to make access to the cellar orderly, inserting the cost as recognition of the producer's availability to welcome and as a form of selection for interested people.

The price of the visit is now becoming a sort of “second cost” – which is constantly increasing, by the way – alongside the fairly general increase in the cost of individual bottles of wine.

The data from the new survey go in this direction and lend themselves to some comparison with the data collected just a year ago.

Some data

Over 540 wineries responded; an indicative sample because it concerns wineries from all Italian regions and with different profiles: that is, both larger wineries (and more structured also in terms of staff organization), and many family-run wineries, where the winemaker often plays multiple roles, including that of welcoming and providing personal storytelling to wine tourists.

Two indications were requested:

the cost of the basic experience; that is, the minimum cost to “enter a winery” and be able to have a minimal experience, perhaps tasting 2-3 wines;

the cost of a more complete experience, which the winery offers by inserting elements of particular charm and/or quality.

A symbolism that recalls what often happens in quality catering, when the price of a basic menu or of a more refined or particularly high-profile menu is indicated.

In communicating the data, we specify that the cost for the basic experience lends itself to further investigation; it is the most trending and most indicative data for understanding the behavior of the wineries.

The cost for the more complete experience contains in fact more variables. It is interpreted by some wineries as a sort of deepening of the basic experience; for others it is a sort of event in the winery that can reach figures even higher than the cost – for example – of a dinner in a quality restaurant.

The sample of over 540 wineries in Italy indicates in euro 21,70 the cost for the basic experience; it was 20.17 a year ago and marks an increase of 8% on the general figure in one year.

In fact, all the wineries surveyed indicate a cost for a basic experience, with the exception of a small percentage that this year is set at 4.5% for which the visit is free; a year ago it was 4%.

And, speaking of more accessible costs, only 12.5% of wineries have an entry fee of 10 euros or less than 10 euros, a figure that is decreasing compared to the 2023 survey (15%).

Going into more detail, the following situation emerges between Northern, Central and Southern Italy:

euro 21.09 Northern Italy; euro 23.35 Central Italy; euro 21.23 Southern Italy.

with a curiosity: the average cost is higher in the south than in the north, even if only slightly; the data for central Italy is influenced by the Tuscany region.

Wanting to delve even deeper, if we consider at least 30 euros as an indicator of a high cost (or at least not low) for a visit to a winery, there are 131 wineries that apply this figure, for a figure equal to 24%.

We then selected some sample regions to verify individual situations and the following picture concerns Piedmont and Tuscany, Veneto and Sicily.