Can Geographical Indications foster local development? Evidence from Montefalco Sagrantino DOCG

Introduction The European Union (EU) has established, since the 1990s, a labelling system based on Geographical Indications (GI), in order to protect food and wine products from specific areas inside the EU member states. In particular, Italy is the EU country with most geographical indications for both food and wine products. With respect to wine, there are 341 DOCs and 78 DOCGs in the country, revealing how much this product is part of Italian culture and is embedded in many different territorial contexts. The country is also the world’s largest wine producer (OIV, 2022) and the national wine production was estimated, in 2021, to have generated a revenue of around 13 billion euros (ISMEA, 2022). These figures demonstrate how much viticulture and wine production play a very significant role in the Italian economy; it is then easy to imagine that wine production must have had, to some extent, a socio-economic impact on the different wine-producing areas. For this reason, it may be interesting to understand how much of this impact or development can actually be attributed to the presence of a local GI. This is a question that other researches have already tried to answer by analysing different types of data. Vaquero-Piñeiro (2021) has considered the municipalities where some of the most performing Italian food and wine PDOs are produced, to understand what are the contextual conditions that have mostly contributed to the economic success of local productions. While it seems that for food PDOs a successful GI may come from thriving socio-economic preconditions, in the case of wine PDOs a higher production value may also derive from other contextual socio-cultural factors; these include cultural traditions, community-based expertise and local identity (Vaquero-Piñeiro, 2021). Differently, Crescenzi et al. (2022) only considered Italian wine protected by GIs, in order to evaluate if these indications actually promote local development in rural areas. By comparing rural municipalities with GIs since 1951 with municipalities without GI status, results indicate that the former areas experience population growth and an economic development in non-farming sectors, including higher value-added activities (Crescenzi et al., 2022). Therefore, this study aims to address the research question “How can a wine GI impact local development?”, in particular regarding the Montefalco Sagrantino DOCG area in the region of Umbria (Central Italy). However, in a different way with respect to the aforementioned researches, we have decided to use qualitative data, in order to understand from local stakeholders if there has been a tangible socio-economic development in the area since the GI establishment and, if so, what is its perceived magnitude. Indeed, qualitative methods have been employed in different studies regarding the development of wine-producing areas (Taplin, 2016; Vázquez Vicente et al., 2021). In addition, we wanted to understand how much of this development, in their opinion, can be attributed to the presence of the wine GI (that is, Sagrantino DOCG). Data and research methodology For this work, we adopted a qualitative method research approach. Data collection was based on primary data sources, that is through semi-structured interviews, which were pre-arranged with the interviewees; every participant was aware that we were collecting data on wine and local development. We selected 21 profiles for both in-person and online interviews, which took place between July and October 2022. These profiles include: 13 wine producers (mostly from the Sagrantino DOCG area, but also from Montalcino DOCG and Sicily); 5 wine experts (including journalists, sommeliers and a sales manager) and 3 local institutional figures from Montefalco