Wine Tourism—A Sustainable Management Tool for Rural Development and Vineyards: Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Consumer Profile from Romania and Moldova

In recent years, tourism products and services have been oriented to offer more experiences than those of classical leisure activities for tourists. More, the COVID-19 pandemic drew a new trend in travel: the tourists are now oriented to internal offers rather than the external ones, to rural regions instead of urban ones. Romania and Moldova are two well-known international countries that are both producers and exporters of Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) wine. The aim of the paper is to analyze (qualitative and quantitative) the motivation of tourists from Romania and Moldova for wine tourism, to model the motivation according to the socio-demographic characteristics of tourists and the specific elements for travel (accommodation, frequencies of visit, average stay). For quantitative analysis, an online questionnaire by convenience sampling was used to collect the data, and statistical methods were used for analysis. Even if these countries have cultural similarities, our results indicate statistically significant different motivations and different profiles of wine tourists. By using a co-occurrence link between the terms from WoS and Scopus scientific articles with VOSviewer software, our results indicate a link between wine tourism, rural and festivals tourism, and cultural heritage. Our research fills a gap in the literature, being the first comparative research on wine tourism in Romania and Moldova.