This book examines wine heritagization as a complex territorial process through which wine-producing regions, landscapes, practices, and identities are selected, represented, and transformed into heritage. Drawing on Italian case studies, the book critically investigates the environmental, economic, social, and institutional consequences of this process for local communities and production systems. Rather than treating heritage as a neutral form of preservation, the chapters analyse how wine heritagization reshapes landscapes, influences tourism development, modifies administrative arrangements, and affects relations between producers, residents, institutions, and markets. Particular attention is devoted to the tensions generated by globalization, territorial branding, economic specialization, land-use change, forest loss, and the growing dependence of wine regions on tourism and symbolic consumption. By addressing these dynamics at multiple geographical scales, the collection asks who benefits, who is marginalized, and what forms of environmental and social transformation are produced when wine becomes territorial heritage.

Elena dell’Agnese is Full Professor of Geography at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Her research focuses on political and cultural geography, critical geopolitics, media and visual geographies, tourism studies, and maritime geopolitics. She is President of the Association of Italian Geographers and formerly served as Vice-President of the International Geographical Union. Her book Ecocritical Geopolitics (Routledge, 2021) explores geopolitical imaginaries, popular culture, and environmental discourse.

Fausto Di Quarto is a geographer whose research focuses on political ecology, environmental conflicts and landscape studies through qualitative approaches, documentary filmmaking, and soundscape studies. He has conducted fieldwork in Brazil, Italy, and other European contexts. His most recent book, The Urbanization of Nature (Unicopli, 2025), explores issues of environmental governance along the Seveso River in Milan.

Jacopo Manni is a PhD Candidate in Geography whose research addresses wine geography, agricultural landscapes, territorial heritage, and climate change. His recent work on the Castelli Romani, published in Conoscere i Castelli Romani (2024), interprets vineyards and olive groves as enduring territorial matrices through which landscape, heritage, and socio-environmental change are historically produced and negotiated within changing rural and peri-urban contexts across Europe.