Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 1 (2019), p. 149

Wine is as much a marker of wealth as it is of trade, and discourses of consumption tend towards luxury and distinction. Yet, in its production, it connotes a rather more rustic engagement with the natural world, prompting comparisons between the domestic and international engagement with national wine cultures and markets. This fascinating volume edited by Anderson and Pinilla is packed with such stories, reconciling them to give a strong sense of how wine markets have evolved across two waves of globalization and over a century of development. The volume emerges from the ground-breaking work on the Global Wine Markets Database (covering 1835 to 2016), and its individual chapters provide a qualitative context for this material which both impressively situates the in-depth data and creates a meaningful cohesion across the book.

The volume is divided into four parts, with substantive engagements first into ‘traditional markets’ (broadly meaning what we call ‘the Old World’ when discussing wine, though including the UK as an important consumer) and ‘newer markets’ (broadly meaning ‘the New World’, though also engaging with emerging markets in Africa and Asia) bookended by the editors providing analytical overviews of the material. The database itself covers 47 individual countries, with a densely detailed and skilfully managed dataset that gives a wonderful overview of changes in the global market for wine across more than a century. The data is woven into the chapters throughout, giving invaluable insight into both the particular and the global. Tables are well presented and labelled throughout, and the ‘Global Overview’ by the editors in part 1 is a particularly rich treasure trove of information. Likewise, in the final chapter, the dataset serves as the basis for the editors to offer econometric projections, forecasts and analyses of likely developments up until 2025.

In the first substantive section, the story of the changing market for French produce is told well by the Franco-Spanish team of Jean-Michel Chevet, Eva Fernández, Eric Giraud-Héraud and Vicente Pinilla. The narrative is focused squarely on the wine sector, charting its many fluctuations in production, consumption, and export in response to pests, war, and the loss of empire. The story is one of the rise and fall of cooperatives as policy tools, the amelioration of varietals, and of complimentary measures to limit production. Here, as throughout, the tone weighs more economic than historical, and despite some strong analysis, chapters conclude by more readily offering predictions for the near future than concise analytical judgements of their historical material. Karl Storchmann does some extraordinarily nimble work summarizing the turbulent twentieth centuries of Germany and Austria (and Switzerland), to show how their wine industries responded to civilizational rupture, and subsequently negotiated the balance between free enterprise and state control. Across two chapters on Italy (the first by Giovanni Federico and Pablo Martinelli, the second by Alessandro Corsi, Eugenio Pomarici and Roberta Sardone) we get a sense of stasis followed by a rapid post-war uplift in production, driven by technological improvement, and a later export boom (beset by the 1986 adulteration scandal). Similar rapid shifts can be seen in chapters on Portugal (by Pedro Lains) and Spain (by Eva Fernández and Vicente Pinilla), and integration into global trade flows in the late twentieth century altered their fortunes (although more positively for Spain).

In the second section on ‘Newer Markets’, we see equally diverse stories. From the collapse in Moroccan and Algerian production described by Giulia Meloni and Johan Swinnen, to booms in Argentina which Steve Stein and Ana María Maetu attribute to the quality revolution in the 1990s that made the wine more palatable to the outside world, and in Chile where William Foster and Oscar Melo point to the ‘return to normalcy’ following the 1988 referendum on military rule as ushering in a more adaptive engagement with international tastes and trade. More noted ‘New World’ stalwarts Australia and New Zealand are surveyed by Kym Anderson, and the Antipodean ‘export-led experience’ after 1986 became a replicable measure of how to challenge established norms in the world of wine. For South Africa (surveyed by Nick Vink, Willem H. Boshoff, Gavin Williams, Johan Fourie and Lewis S. McLean), those lessons – tested in earlier export booms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – would be fully employed after the end of apartheid in 1994. Another New World champion is clearly the United States, which is surveyed by Julian M. Alston, James T. Lapsely, Olena Sambucci and Daniel A. Summer. Here, the table wine revolution of the 1960s was recognized as a marker of quality at the famous 1976 Judgement of Paris and led eventually to a second boom driven by Californian expansion in the 1990s. Kym Anderson’s final content chapter on ‘Asia and other Emerging Regions’ presents a sense of how China in particular has led the Asian share of global wine consumption to treble from 2000 to 2016, and also contributed strongly to burgeoning production levels.

From these myriad examples the book presents not a single story, but a variety of developments as diverse as their terroirs and interlinked by the development of a global marketplace. It benefits, however, from the perspective this brings; for example, the concept of ‘comparative advantage’ (the share of wine in national merchandise exports divided by wine’s share of global exports) gives a valuable analytical tool to understand and contextualize pronounced global changes. The scope of precise, generous, and well-presented information and analysis across all these chapters is truly global in scale, and the result is a testament to the excellent work of both contributors and editors. This book would make a valuable acquisition for many university libraries for the sake of its contextualized dataset alone. Yet, it will also be of great appeal to researchers and students keen to situate their knowledge of a particular country or region within a broader historical and global context. This volume is an invaluable compendium of broad economic insight and sharp historical analysis which I would heartily recommend.