The regional wine and gastronomy offer in restaurants of north Portugal

Restaurants play an important role in tourism destination development as they are not only providing food and beverage services to tourists but also are acting as ambassadors of the local and regional wine and gastronomy heritage. Now that tourists are ever more eager to know and certainly to experience local products and local food, restaurants adapt to these new consumer trends, throwing the attention to what is endogenous. Portugal, being a country well known for its Mediterranean diet and its great variety of wines produced all over the country in 13 officially recognised wine regions, seems to be the perfect spot to verify this rather recent phenomenon. However, the researchers of the INNOVINE & WINE project, whose main objective is to find scientific arguments for the most profitable promotion of wine and gastronomy tourism in the North of Portugal, noticed that the endogenous products of the region are not always easily recognisable on the menus of the local restaurants. In lots of smaller restaurants in the northern region, for example, the locally produced wines may not only not outnumber the wines coming from more traditional Portuguese wine regions like Dão, Alentejo, or Setúbal but may not even be identified as being of the region. The main objective of the present research is to determine to what extent the wines and gastronomy of the “endogenous” demarcated wine regions Vinho Verde, Douro and Trás-os-Montes are present and identified on the menus of the restaurants situated in North Portugal. To be more specific: the research team was urged to quantify in what ways local food and wines are present on the menu, and to assess whether local dishes and wines are paired in the menus of the restaurants or whether only oral recommendations are made. A short online survey implemented through ArcGIS software (ArcGIS 123 Survey) was sent by e-mail and filled out by the restaurant owners of the selected wine regions, and provided georeferenced data, which allowed the visualisation of the results on maps. The outputs contribute to systematise the knowledge about what kind of wines and dishes restaurants select for their menus, how this information is displayed, and how local food and wine pairing is done. At least three outcomes are foreseen. First, the role of the restaurants in the preservation and promotion of the regional wine and gastronomy heritage can be evaluated. Moreover, the owners of restaurants who underestimate local products in their menus are detected and then can be invited to workshops where they learn how to take better advantage of local strengths. And finally, the data of different types of restaurants can be bundled, and this information is useful to develop more coherent and responsible marketing and management plans so that each niche, in the best possible way, can give a more efficient contribution to the promotion of not only wine and gastronomy tourism, but even food tourism, in the North of Portugal