TOURISM OFFICIALS VISIT MERIDIANA VINEYARDS

TOURISM OFFICIALS VISIT MERIDIANA VINEYARDS

The Minister for Tourism, the Hon. Michael Refalo, and officials from the Ministry of Tourism and Malta Tourism Authority and their families were Mr. Mark Miceli Farrugia's guests yesterday evening as they were taken on a tour of the Meridiana estate.

In a short "thank you" speech Minister Refalo said that as every one benefited from the tourist industry, given some thought, everything and every one could be of benefit to the industry.

"Due to the smallness of Malta's agricultural sector and the size of fields and estates talk of agri-tourism in the conventional sense is a non-starter. However, this sector offers a vast number of opportunities where demonstration to visitors of traditional arts and crafts is a welcome and interesting additional extension to Malta's product offer. Organisers, especially those planning of programmes for the group and incentive segment, look out for novel and unusual activities to give their clients a fuller experience of the different facets of Malta and the Maltese."

The Minister said that tourism furnished Malta's manufacturers and producers with a further 35,000 consumers daily. This regular influx of visitors had encouraged Malta's entrepreneurial and business classes to invest and branch out into different fields to satisfy the demands of a larger and sometimes more demanding clientele.

"There were times in the past when Maltese snobbed local wine. This is not the case today. Many brands of local wine are superior to the equivalent imported variety. When a wine is better than another it justifies a higher price independently of where it has been produced."