While under a strong and stable rural regime, changes have a hard time to diffuse beyond the niche-level, they may eventually breakthrough when the regime is weak. In this paper we argue that rural transition towards tourism development was fostered in those areas with a weak rural regime. On this perspective it is possible to understand the reasons that prevented RT development in many wine regions in France, except in Alsace, Champagne and Cognac (Frochot, 2000; Lignon-Darmaillac, 2009; Schirmer and Randelli, 2009): the rural regime based on wine production was to strong and successful to enable a novelty like tourism. In this paper the transition from a rural development model (unifunctional) to another (multifunctional) is conceptualized as shifts from one stable rural configuration to a new one by interacting processes at the different levels of landscape, rural regimes and niches. The transition is incremental and the configuration may differ regionally. The result is a framework structured on four different stages, as shown in the following table.