In the wine capital of Portugal, the city of Porto, after more than five years of preparatory work, the world’s largest amusement park for wine lovers has opened – World of Wine, abbreviated as WOW. By bringing together six thematic museums and two specialized schools, the project has taken on an ambitious cultural and educational mission. Refurbishment of wine cellars, in which on an area of 55,000 sq. m located megaattraction, cost investors 105 million euros.
In its scope, the Portuguese project surpassed all previous attempts to develop a wine theme in the format of a cultural attraction. For comparison: the grandiose wine center Cité du Vin, which has been operating in Bordeaux since 2016, spent “only” about 80 million euros. Due to pandemic restrictions, tourist flows to WOW have not yet flooded in, and the general public has not yet had time to appreciate the concept, but the scale of investments, of course, causes the wow effect that the founders were counting on.
The opening of the wine park, scheduled for early 2020, was delayed until July 31 due to the coronavirus, and due to the growth of the second wave, some parts of the project – the museum of wine accessories and drinking vessels, the school of wine craftsmanship, the gastronomy school, the chocolate museum and the museum fashion – will be opened to visitors in stages.
According to Adrian Bridge, CEO and main shareholder of WOW, as well as co-owner of one of the oldest Portuguese wine houses – Taylor, Fladgate & Yeatman, the idea of an amusement park for wine lovers was born back in 2010, when on the high slope of Vila Nova de Gaia (the right-bank area of Porto, where most of the wine warehouses are located), the first Yeatman Wine Suite Hotel opened. A year later, here, with the same fascinating panoramic view of the city and the river, the first gourmet restaurant appeared. The growing number of visitors and the interest in wine, teased with appetite, prompted the founders to take the project to a new scale.
“We realized that a place with an incredibly rich history, connected not only with wine, but also with cultural heritage, with gastronomic traditions, with architecture, deserves it,” Bridge says. “And we also realized that today people don’t want to be tourists, they want to be travelers.”
WOW is as if created from the textbook of the latest marketing. Wine is presented here as an experience, an experience, a discovery and an adventure – in exact accordance with the theory of Economy of Experience, which has been talked about so much lately. This theory suggests that for the modern consumer, the experience of getting to know an object and remembering it turn out to be more important than the object itself and than the fact of acquiring it. Paradoxically, the contact of modern wine connoisseurs with the secrets of the birth of port may be more important than the port itself.
WOW demystification
However, let’s be precise in the wording: the creators of the WOW-Park do not want to surround the wine with a veil of mystery. On the contrary, they seek to dispel these secrets. “We decided to give people information without hoaxes, in a logical sequence,” Bridge continues. “I don’t like complications at all and I prefer good stories.”
The creators of WOW tell their good stories about wine in the most modern ways. For example, visitors can study the process of grape ripening using a 3D model of a giant berry, and understand how fermentation takes place by plunging into a virtual oak barrel of wine. If you are confused by the abundance of information, then a hologram of a wine expert will help you to realize your own preferences in numerous wine styles.
In terms of the abundance of multimedia effects and audiovisual technology, the Portuguese WOW surpasses other wine “places of power” – the Bordeaux Cité du Vin located in a futuristic tower, the Vivanco wine museum buried in a giant cellar, and even more so the London Vinopolis that has sunk into oblivion. There is reason to hope that, at least due to the achievements of scientific and technological progress, WOW will be more successful than its predecessors, who no less well-meaningly sought to dispel the halo of wine secrets.
The movement to demystify wine has been around the world for decades. And by a strange coincidence, in which, if you wish, you can see a causal relationship, the consumption of wine in the world over the same decades has been slowly but steadily declining. Demystification is akin to defamation, only it is conceived for the good, but for some reason it works the other way around.
After all, how many revealing words have been said, for example, about the detrimental effect of burgers – on karma, feng shui, female attractiveness and male potency – and just looking at a beautiful photo of another Big Mac still causes inevitable salivation, and the number of burger outlets in public catering continues to grow. . And, on the contrary, how many beautiful, correct words about wine have been uttered during a four-hour tour of London’s Vinopolis, but it still closed.
Optimism in the current historical situation is, perhaps, only due to the fact that in terms of the strength of the wow-effect, no sophisticated sensory experiences have yet come close to an excellent glass of wine.