Culinary travel isn’t a niche category anymore. It’s one of the fastest-growing segments in all of travel, and 2026 is shaping up to be a particularly strong year for it. Across nearly every major trend report and travel forecast, the same message keeps surfacing: people don’t just want to eat well on vacation anymore. They want to participate. They want to understand a place through its food and wine, not just consume it as a backdrop to sightseeing.
That shift is changing what a great culinary trip actually looks like. The travelers driving this category now want to forage the herbs that end up in their lunch, blend the wine they’ll drink that night, and shake hands with the person who grew, raised, or fermented what’s on their plate. The destination still matters enormously — but increasingly, so does the depth of the experience within it.
Here’s a closer look at the trends defining culinary travel, along with the destinations where those trends are showing up most vividly right now.
The Big Trends Shaping Culinary Travel
1. Hands-On Is the New Fine Dining
The single clearest trend in food and wine travel right now is the shift from watching to doing. Cooking classes, market tours, foraging walks, and behind-the-scenes producer visits have moved from “nice add-on” to the actual centerpiece of why people book a culinary trip in the first place. Travelers want to learn the technique behind a regional dish, not just taste the finished version of it.
This isn’t simply about novelty. There’s a real cognitive and emotional difference between eating a meal someone else prepared and eating a meal you helped make from ingredients you gathered yourself. A trip built around a market visit and a hands-on cooking class produces a kind of memory — and a kind of understanding of a place — that a restaurant reservation alone cannot.
This trend shows up clearly in experiences like blending your own wine cuvée alongside a winemaker in Argentina’s Mendoza region, or spending a morning foraging wild herbs in the Georgian countryside before turning them into your own lunch. The meal matters. The process matters more.
2. Wine Tourism Is Expanding Beyond the Usual Suspects
For decades, “wine travel” mostly meant a short list of famous names — Napa, Bordeaux, Tuscany. That list is widening fast. Wine-curious travelers, many of whom have already done the classic regions, are actively seeking out wine country that doesn’t show up on everyone else’s itinerary: regions with serious winemaking traditions that haven’t yet been fully discovered by international tourism.
Croatia’s Istria Peninsula is a good example of this shift in action — often described as “the new Tuscany,” it’s drawing wine and food travelers away from Croatia’s more crowded coastline specifically because it still feels undiscovered. The same appetite is fueling growing interest in wine regions across the American West and the southern hemisphere, where the wine is excellent and the crowds haven’t caught up yet.
South Africa’s Cape Winelands are a strong example of this trend already in motion — a wine region producing some of the best bottles in the world, paired with a culinary identity shaped by African, Dutch, Malay, and Cape Creole influences that most travelers haven’t experienced yet. Closer to home, Oregon’s Willamette Valley and Washington’s Walla Walla region offer the same appeal: serious, internationally respected wine, without the saturation of more famous American wine country.
3. The Rise of Regenerative and Community-Based Travel
A meaningful shift is underway in how travelers think about the impact of their trip. Rather than simply consuming a destination, more travelers want their visit to genuinely benefit the people and places behind the experience — staying at family-run properties, buying directly from small producers, and supporting the kind of long-term relationships that sustain a region’s food and wine culture rather than just extracting from it.
This trend rewards exactly the kind of access that takes years to build: relationships with family wineries who don’t open their doors to large tour groups, truffle hunters who won’t take a call from a stranger, small breweries and farms where the owner is the one pouring your glass or serving your plate. Increasingly, travelers can tell the difference between a curated, relationship-based experience and a transactional one — and they’re choosing the former.
4. Slow Travel and Fewer, Deeper Stops
For years, the dominant travel instinct was to see as much as possible — three countries in a week, a new city every two nights. That instinct is reversing. More travelers, particularly those drawn to food and wine, are choosing to go deeper into fewer places rather than wider across more of them.
This makes sense for culinary travel specifically. You cannot rush a wine region. You cannot understand a food culture in a single afternoon. The trips that produce the most meaningful experiences tend to be the ones that allow real time in one place — long enough to return to a favorite café twice, long enough to have a real conversation with a winemaker rather than a rehearsed tasting room script, long enough for the pace of a region to actually settle into you.
A week immersed in Tuscany’s wine country, or in Portugal’s Douro Valley, produces something a rushed multi-country itinerary simply can’t: the sense of having actually been somewhere, rather than having passed through it.
5. The Search for the “Undiscovered” Food Region
Overtourism fatigue is real, and it’s reshaping where people want to go. Destinations that feel saturated — overcrowded restaurants, lines for everything, a sense that you’re one of thousands moving through the same script — are losing their appeal even when the food is genuinely excellent. In their place, travelers are actively seeking out food regions that still feel like a discovery.
Peru is one of the clearest examples of this trend in 2026. Long associated primarily with Machu Picchu, Peru is increasingly being recognized — and sought out — for its extraordinary gastronomy, with Lima’s dining scene now considered one of the most exciting in the world. Travelers are looking past the classic tourist circuit toward the country’s culinary depth: its markets, its Andean ingredients, and its rapidly growing reputation among serious food travelers.
Portugal tells a similar story, though it’s a few years further along. It’s no longer entirely undiscovered, but it still carries the feeling of a destination that rewards travelers who got there before it became obvious — exceptional wine in the Douro Valley, a dining scene in Lisbon that keeps surprising people, and a sense of authenticity that hasn’t yet been smoothed over by mass tourism.
6. Multigenerational and Group Travel on the Rise
More travelers are pooling resources and time for one significant trip together rather than several smaller ones — siblings, multigenerational families, longtime friend groups, and wine or food enthusiast communities who’d rather plan one extraordinary week than several ordinary ones. Culinary and wine travel is particularly well suited to this trend, since shared meals and wine are naturally social in a way that, say, a packed sightseeing itinerary isn’t.
This is part of why private, custom-dated group tours have become such an appealing format. They let a self-selected group of people — who already know they travel well together — build a trip around the destination and pace that suits them, without needing to fit into someone else’s fixed departure schedule.
Destinations to Watch: Where Trend Meets Experience
A handful of destinations are showing up again and again in 2026 and 2027 trend forecasts — and they happen to align closely with some of the most compelling food and wine travel available right now.
Portugal continues its multi-year rise as one of Europe’s most exciting culinary destinations. It still offers the increasingly rare combination of serious wine country, an evolving and ambitious food scene, and a sense of discovery that’s harder to find in Western Europe’s more saturated destinations. The Douro Valley, in particular, remains one of the most beautiful and least-crowded wine regions on the continent.
South Africa has quietly become one of the most talked-about food destinations in the world right now, with its Cape Winelands and Cape Town’s diverse culinary identity drawing increasing attention from serious food travelers. The pairing of world-class wine with a genuinely distinctive cuisine — and, in many itineraries, a safari to follow — makes it one of the more unexpected and rewarding combinations in global culinary travel.
Peru is having a true breakout moment in global gastronomy circles, with food writers and travel forecasters increasingly framing it as a culinary destination first and a historical one second. The depth of Peruvian cuisine — its markets, its Andean ingredients, its rapidly evolving restaurant scene — rewards exactly the kind of immersive, hands-on travel that today’s culinary travelers are seeking.
Tuscany remains the steady, established leader of culinary travel, and 2026 is proving to be a particularly strong year for it — not because it’s newly discovered, but because overall demand for serious food and wine travel is rising, and Tuscany continues to be the destination against which everything else gets measured. Its wine, its truffles, its olive oil, and its unhurried pace make it less a trend and more a permanent fixture at the top of the list.
Chile and Argentina, taken together, exemplify the hands-on trend better than almost anywhere else. A blending course alongside a working winemaker, set against the backdrop of two dramatically different wine cultures separated by the Andes, is precisely the kind of participatory, story-rich experience that’s defining culinary travel right now.
What This Means for Your Next Trip
The throughline across all of these trends is simple: culinary travel rewards going deeper, not wider. Fewer destinations, more participation. Fewer crowds, more genuine connection to the people growing, cooking, brewing, and pouring what ends up in front of you.
Wherever you’re drawn to next — a wine region you’ve never considered, a food culture you’ve been meaning to explore, or a destination that’s quietly become the conversation among people who take their travel seriously — the experiences that will stay with you are the ones that let you slow down enough to actually be there.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most popular culinary travel destination right now? Portugal and Tuscany are consistently among the most in-demand culinary destinations in 2026, though Peru and South Africa are seeing the fastest-growing interest among food-focused travelers looking for something less saturated.
Are wine tours still trending in 2026? Yes — and the trend is expanding rather than slowing. Wine tourism is growing both in established regions and in lesser-known wine countries that are gaining international recognition for the first time.
What makes a culinary trip feel different from a typical vacation with good food? The defining difference is participation. Trips built around cooking classes, market visits, foraging, and direct relationships with small producers tend to feel far more memorable than itineraries built solely around restaurant reservations.
Is it better to visit one culinary destination deeply or several destinations briefly? Current travel trends strongly favor depth over breadth. Wine and food culture rarely reveal themselves in a single afternoon — the most rewarding culinary trips tend to allow real time in fewer places.
