Wine tourism gives €150 million boost to Montalcino

Nov 24 2025, 07:30 | by Louis Thomas

New data shows that almost 235,000 people visited the home of Brunello di Montalcino last year, an influx which is giving the region a major economic lift

The data, released during last week's Benvenuto Brunello event and reported on by Giorgio dell'Orefice writing for Il Sole, shows that 2024 was a record year for tourist numbers to the celebrated Tuscan wine region of Montalcino and that early estimates for this year's figure will follow a similarly positive trajectory.

2024's figure is 6.3% above that of 2023 and almost a third higher than the pre-Covid, 2019 level. Almost three quarters (71%) of last year's visitors were international tourists, with Americans taking up the lion's share – unsurprising, given that the US, even with tariffs, remains the biggest export market for Brunello di Montalcino.

To put the 235,000 visitor figure into perspective, the 310 kilometre squared area, centred around the town of Montalcino itself, has a resident population of fewer than 6,000, according to information from the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica Italia.

Financial boost

This huge level of tourist traffic results in wine sales which in turn inject cash into the local economy, with it calculated that every bottle of Brunello which is opened provides a boost of €117.

Consorzio del Vino Brunello di Montalcino president Giacomo Bartolommei commented, as quoted in Orefice's article: "Wine tourism in our territory is proving to be a multiplier of wealth that positively influences not only the wine-producing enterprises, grappling with a difficult agenda between tariffs in the USA and a drop in consumption, but also the entire economy of the Montalcino territory, for a direct and indirect benefit, according to the estimates of the UIV-Vinitaly Observatory, of over 150 million euros."

However, as positive as this news may seem, Bartolommei warned that events across the Atlantic have meant that the celebrations will have to be short-lived: "We are happy about the good performance of wine tourism, but obviously our main task is to continue to produce and sell wine of excellent quality. We have experienced a complex year mainly because of the uncertainty about tariffs and their extent."