Abstract
Although questions of “quality” have gained prominence in economic geography, research has not fully explored recent discussions on processes of qualification in economic sociology. This paper has two key aims. The first is to introduce the way qualification processes have been conceptualized in recent pragmatism-inspired, process-oriented social science contributions, drawing particularly on work relating to actor-network theory, as well as on studies focusing on status/aesthetic markets. The second is to make this body of literature fruitful for a geographical perspective on product qualification in status/aesthetic markets. For the second aim, the paper empirically focuses on the global fine wine market. Since consumer products have increasingly become aestheticized in recent decades, an analysis of the geographies of fine wine qualification—an agricultural product that is also a key example of an aesthetic/status product—can provide insights into the dynamics of aestheticization in the food and beverages market more broadly. In order to advance a global perspective on fine wine qualification, this paper draws on qualitative empirical research in three wine regions around the world: South Tyrol (Italy), Salta (Argentina) and Marlborough (New Zealand). It argues that qualifying products is not only a highly reflexive and dynamic process, as contributions from economic sociology have revealed, but also, and crucially, a profoundly geographical matter.
Introduction
During the last two decades, studies on qualification and valuation have become significantly more important in economic sociology (e.g. Beckert and Aspers, 2011; Beckert and Musselin, 2013; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Callon et al., 2002; Hutter and Stark, 2015; Karpik, 2010). Much of this literature has been influenced by the philosophy of pragmatism and shares a process-orientation: it is not quality and value but the situated and contextualized processes of qualifying and valuing that are of interest. Within this field there has been a focus on status/aesthetic markets, in which the value of a product is primarily related to symbolic qualities and, consequently, market intermediaries and devices play a key role (various contributions in Beckert and Aspers, 2011; Beckert et al., 2017; Garcia-Parpet, 2008, 2011; Karpik, 2010). Nevertheless, this work has only tackled qualifications’ spatial dimensions in passing.
By putting the spatialities of qualification at the heart of the analysis, this paper aims to contribute to an economic geography of status/aesthetic markets. It thus feeds into recent work in (cultural) economic geography that has started to investigate different aspects of the geographies of (symbolic) value creation in status/aesthetic markets, analyzing the importance of the micro-geographies of retail design and display (Crewe, 2016), as well as the varied geographies of brands and branding and, in particular, processes of geographical association (Overton and Heitger, 2008; Overton and Murray, 2016; Pike, 2015; Tokatli, 2014) and geographies of dissociation (Ibert et al., 2019). Recent studies have suggested that we are witnessing an aestheticization of everyday life and consumer products (Aspers and Beckert, 2011; Ibert et al., 2019; Reckwitz, 2017; Rössel and Beckert, 2013). By following this line of argument, this paper assumes that the way fine wine is qualified and valued might arguably have repercussions for the food and beverages market more broadly. As Beckert et al. (2017: 207) put it: “Studying markets such as the wine market thus helps us to develop the analytical tools to understand much wider aspects of the contemporary economy.”
The paper is structured as follows. I start by outlining key arguments concerning qualification processes from an economic sociologist, actor network theory (ANT)-inspired perspective, with particular emphasis on the work done in this field by Michel Callon. In what follows, I introduce a body of literature that has analyzed (the particularities of) qualification processes in aesthetic markets. I then turn my attention to how these insights can help an understanding of qualification processes’ spatialities. Therefore, the paper draws on qualitative empirical fieldwork undertaken between 2015 and 2017 in three different wine regions across the globe: Salta (Argentina), Marlborough (New Zealand) and South Tyrol (Italy).
Economic sociology and qualification processes
Quality does not exist in the sense that it is “out there” and can be objectively measured or described, but rather it is the very process of describing and measuring that co-constructs particular product qualities. Following this insight, those interested in product quality have shifted their focus to the processes of qualifying products. Following Callon et al. (2002: 199), products are considered to be the result of earlier (and always ongoing) qualification trials. To study this process, they propose an analytical distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic qualities. On the one hand, the material qualities of a specific good undergoing a qualification process always matter in terms of the outcome of this process. On the other hand, a wide range of extrinsic qualities such as the judgments of product critics not only evaluate but—in the sense of a performative approach (see Callon, 2009 for a thorough discussion)—co-shape the very qualities in question. The case of wine aging in a French oak barrique can serve to illustrate that making an analytical distinction between material and symbolic qualities is no easy task. While aging in a barrique profoundly changes the material qualities of the respective wines, adding new flavors and pushing back others, barriques (and their respective cellars) at the same time attribute symbolic qualities to wines and wineries. According to Aspers and Beckert (2011: 5–6) quality relates to the material and symbolic characteristics of a certain object or service, whereas value refers to the justification of its worth. Value goes beyond purely economic terms and can also include aesthetic or moral values. Aspers (2013: 60) sees value as “the manifestation of what actors see in the offers, as sellers or buyers.”
Convention theory has undoubtedly been the most influential source of geographical conceptualizations of quality, particularly in agri-food markets. As with French pragmatic sociology more generally, convention theorists reject the idea that consumers’ uncertainty regarding the judgment of quality of certain products stems from a lack of information. For them, it is conventions, shared beliefs and regularities between market actors (e.g. concerning product quality) that allow the markets to function (Ponte, 2016: 13). Geographers applying conventions theory to agri-food studies have mainly been interested in alternative food networks and in how to explain the shifts from an industrialized food convention to a greater importance of alternative conventions (e.g. Murdoch et al., 2000; Murdoch and Miele, 1999).
Arguing for a shift from the analysis of the economy towards processes of economization, Çalişkan and Callon (2009: 384) argued against focusing too strongly on institutions, rules and conventions and have instead recommended focusing on the role of techniques, calculating instruments and material infrastructure for market formation. With reference to the work of American pragmatist John Dewey, they state: “things circulate because they are valued and it is because they are valued that they become goods. Circulation consists of an essentially dual process involving continuous requalification and valuation. This explains why the materialities of things matter” (Çalişkan and Callon, 2009: 389). This understanding of valuation and (re)qualification is more attentive “to the conditions of complexity and mobility in the relations between things, people and their context” (Çalişkan and Callon, 2009: 389) than the more stable orders of worth or quality conventions (even if always considered mutable and in dynamic interplay).
Starting from the assertion that for economic agents on the production side the possibility of changing the qualities of a certain product is a strategic resource, Callon et al. (2002: 200) shift the attention to how this process of qualifying goods is realized in markets. They argue that, on the one hand, every good—in order to be qualified—has to be made comparable with other goods and, on the other hand, also has to be singularized to stand out in the wide range of similar goods and attract the consumer. It becomes clear that qualification is necessarily a paradoxical process that always swings between these two seemingly contradictory challenges.
The search for constant mutual understanding of ideas and perceptions concerning certain products, and the consequent elaboration of (improved) strategies for the way goods can be qualified so that they succeed, lends the organization of qualification processes a highly reflexive dynamic. When referring to the “economy of qualities,” it is precisely this reflexive dynamic of markets that Callon et al. (2002: 212) have in mind: “competition turns around the attachment of consumers to products whose qualities have progressively been defined with their active participation.” For this constant process of qualification and requalification of goods to position them, market intermediaries play a crucial role (Hennion, 2017). Callon and Muniesa (2005: 1234) reject the idea of an active consumer acquiring a passive good: “The purchase is not the result of a subject-object encounter, both external to each other, but of a process of attachment, which, from qualification to requalification of the product, leads to the singularization of its properties.” The adjustment of a product to the buyers’ world can also be achieved through transforming the latter. Additionally, to make this constant process of (re)negotiation between supply and demand possible, economic agents design diverse socio-technical devices 1 such as algorithms and models, product reviews or marketing tools.
In recent years studies have analyzed qualification, classification and valuation processes in diverse economic fields. Nevertheless, status/aesthetic markets (e.g. various contributions in Beckert and Aspers, 2011) have been of particularly strong empirical interest and, against this backdrop, many studies have focused on the wine market (Beckert et al., 2017; Garcia-Parpet, 2008, 2011; Karpik, 2010; Ponte, 2009; Rössel and Beckert, 2013). Why this focus on aesthetic markets?
Qualification in aesthetic markets
Qualification and valuation in aesthetic/status markets are different from standard markets (Aspers, 2009; Aspers and Beckert, 2011). Quality is not natural or prefixed in standard markets either, but, as a result of the use and common acceptance of certain quality judgment devices, “the criteria and techniques for measuring quality […] are so much taken for granted that they appear to actors as ‘natural’ and become uncontested reference points for their quality judgments” (Rössel and Beckert, 2013: 291).
In contrast, those markets that have been called either aesthetic or status markets are characterized by not having a standard that market participants almost universally accept. As a result, quality uncertainty cannot be explained as an information problem, but stems from the very fact that what counts as quality in these markets is highly uncertain and contested, “because objective tests are more difficult to set up” (Callon et al., 2002: 204). Hence, the extrinsic or symbolic dimensions of quality—such as the judgments of critics or journalists—play a crucial role in these markets. In aesthetic markets, it is particularly the status-conferring, positional aspect of consuming a certain good that motivates buyers; thus suppliers have to invest in conferring this symbolic quality on their products. As the classical work of Thorstein Veblen (2007 [1899]) underlined more than a hundred years ago, the consumption of certain goods plays a key role in demonstrating and demarcating social positions (see also Bourdieu, 2000). Coining the term “conspicuous consumption”, Veblen (2007 [1899]) pointed to the importance of status-seeking performance and the construction of social identity through consumption processes. 2
The fine wine market has caught the attention of many social science scholars, because it shows strong quality uncertainty on the one hand while on the other symbolic qualities are hugely important. As Lucien Karpik put it in his plea for an economics of singularities: “No better demonstration [than the market for fine wines] can be found that quality competition prevails over price competition” (Karpik, 2010: 142). For Karpik, judgment devices are key to the valuation of products in an economy of singularities, constituted by markets of “singular, incommensurable products” (Karpik, 2010: 3; emphasis in original). He distinguishes between personal judgment devices (the personal networks made up of friends, family, etc.) and impersonal judgment devices, which he subdivides into: (a) appellations (e.g. product brands, umbrella brands or registered designations of origin), (b) cicerones (critics and guides that offer evaluations), (c) rankings (hierarchical arrangements of singularities) and (d) confluences (techniques used to channel buyers such as spatial organization and selling skills) (Karpik, 2010: 44–46).
Drawing heavily on Karpik (2010), Reckwitz (2017) has recently argued that we currently live in a “society of singularities.” One of his key arguments is that the techniques of standardization, which have become key in modern society, have taken the form of complex background structures which drive processes of singularization in our post-modern, neoliberal era. Quantitative technologies such as data-tracking devices, rankings and ratings now “systematically fabricate objects as singular” (Reckwitz, 2017:20). In a similar vein, Aspers and Beckert (2011: 13) have argued that the importance of goods’ symbolic meanings in affluent contemporary societies has increased to a point where “the question arises: Are symbolic meanings to be understood as the leading sources of value today?” Hence, an analysis of a market where aesthetic qualities play a crucial role in the valuation of products such as the fine wine market is promising, since these are likely to widen their reach, particularly in more affluent consumer societies.
As analyzed by French economic sociologist Marie-France Garcia-Parpet, the rapidly increasing influence of wine judges and wine critics such as Robert Parker has altered the global wine market. As Garcia-Parpet demonstrates for Languedoc-Roussillon, a French region that has for centuries been associated with cheap bulk wine, some pioneers who intentionally did not try to qualify their wines through the traditional French system but instead through adopting other ways of producing and qualifying wine, more attuned to what she calls the “Anglo-Saxon model” (2008: 241) (focus on single-grape wines, technology and strong labels), successfully transformed the region’s image. Wine critics’ celebration of these pioneering wines has been a cornerstone of their positioning—and concurrently the repositioning of Languedoc-Roussillon—on the international and subsequently also the French wine map. Hence, Garcia-Parpet’s work implicitly points to the spatialities of qualifying wines.
While economic sociology has provided important insights into questions of qualification and valuation in aesthetic markets, its spatial dimensions have only been tackled in passing. In what follows, underpinned by empirical examples from the global fine wine market, I want to contribute to a geographical perspective on qualification processes in aesthetic markets.
Data and methodology
To advance a global perspective on geographies of qualification, I draw on qualitative empirical research conducted between 2015 and 2017 in three wine regions around the globe: South Tyrol (Italy), Salta (Argentina) and Marlborough (New Zealand). Since the 1990s, all three regions—even though their socio-cultural and historical backgrounds are strikingly different—have significantly restructured their wine industries, and a large number of wineries have attempted to position themselves in the fine wine market. Inspired by the Callonian notion of an “economy of qualities” (Callon et al., 2002), the main goal in the three case studies was to analyze from a geographical perspective how, in the process of wine production restructuring, (new) qualities have been “attributed, stabilized, objectified and arranged” (Callon et al., 2002: 199). In total, 54 interviews (17 interviews in New Zealand, 18 in Italy and 19 in Argentina) were conducted with oenologists, winery owners, winery executives in administration and/or commercialization (including a broad range of businesses ranging from very small lifestyle wineries to grape-growing and wine-making cooperatives to transnational beverage companies) and representatives of the respective regional wine industry associations. While this paper focuses on the fine wine market, the fieldwork attempted to cover the whole range of producers, from mass (bulk) wine to the premium segment (see also Rainer et al., 2019b).
Fine wines and their geographies of qualification
New World wine regions and the broadening of the global fine wine market
Some regions in New World wine countries—e.g. Napa Valley in the USA, Casablanca in Chile and Mendoza in Argentina—now stand, along with some long-established European wine regions, for quality wine production. New World wine producers and market intermediaries had to invest in making wines comparable with those of (European) premium wine regions and, at the same time, afford them properties that made them unique, giving consumers the possibility to (re)calculate and persuade them to change their buying decisions.
As a first step, grape cultivation and winery processing techniques had to be transformed. For example, pruning vines has become a key task in vineyard management. Pruning vine branches leads to a higher concentration of sugars and aromas within the (fewer remaining) grapes. These grapes can then be transformed into more intensive wines. Pruning and vineyard management are global characteristics of fine wine production that have been key to achieving attachment of market intermediaries and fine wine buyers.
Besides a general restructuring of grape cultivation and winery processing techniques, producers from the Salta wine region aiming to position their wines on the global fine wine market adapted wine styles to the world of global fine buyers. “If you export, let’s say to the United States, you are lucky if they even know where Argentina is located. It is the Argentine Malbec that they are familiar with” (interview with a boutique winery owner, 3 Sep 2014). The strong growth of Malbec in terms of production area in the 2000s (see Rainer, 2016: 262) is mainly attributable to the effort of making Salta’s wines suitable for an international fine wine buyer’s palate. Hence, in order to enter distant markets, producers qualified their wine brands by attributing internationally recognized characteristics of Argentine wines to them, whereas their local origin—Cafayate/Valles, Calchaquíes/Salta—lost importance for marketing. Pike (2015) discusses this strategy of changing from a local to a national-scale origination for Newcastle Brown Ale, but in the case of Salta’s wines it meant modifying not only the branding and marketing but also the material qualities of the product itself. Another strategy for boutique wineries has been to establish contracts with well-known international winemaking consultants—called flying winemakers (Lagendijk, 2004). First, this is in order to restructure processes in the vineyards and wineries and henceforth change the wine-making style. Second, it helps wineries to position their wines globally by creating an association between the wines and the reputation of these winemakers.
While the fact that wines in Salta are produced at an altitude of between approximately 1700 to 3000 meters did not play an important role until the 1990s, this has fundamentally changed since. The altitude of vineyards has become a key means of differentiation on a global fine wine market which allows producers and market intermediaries to directly compare wines with other premium wine regions and—even though consumers are completely unfamiliar with the regional production context in Salta—provides them with an easily objectifiable (externally testable, traceable and comprehensible) singularity. “All wine regions have the same characteristics: thermal amplitude, sunny days, little rainfall; that is pretty much the same everywhere, but our highlight is that we have the highest vineyards on earth” (manager of a boutique winery, 1 Sep 2014). The number of vineyards on slopes has strongly increased since the 1990s, and the particularities of high-altitude wines and their virtues 3 are stressed. The most illustrative example of this tendency is the Hess family wine estate’s efforts to establish the world’s highest vineyards—estate maximum altitude—as part of their Salta winery Colomé, and to produce the world’s highest wine from it. 4 Altitude in this case works in a similar way to a standard that makes the wines comparable through an easily feasible and objectifiable test—measuring altitude—and at the same time renders them singular at another level.
While vineyards’ altitude is the key way of making Salta’s wines comparable and singularizing them on the global market, in Marlborough it is a new way of interpreting a traditional French grape. While until the 1970s there was no wine production at all on New Zealand’s South Island, Marlborough’s Sauvignon Blancs are considered New World style today. It is primarily the higher thiols that lead to these intensive, fruit-driven Sauvignon Blancs with fresh acidity. Expressing this style is thus a central goal of Marlborough’s wine producers. I suppose—classically, you look at Sauvignon Blanc, its home is the Loire Valley—Sancy and Pouilly-Fumé—now those wines are very, very different from what we have in Marlborough. So, they would focus probably more than anything else on structure and texture of the wine. In Marlborough, the one thing that we had when we first started making Sauvignon Blanc was very, very high thiol content. The thiol is the aroma compound that is the passion fruit, pineapple, tropical fruit. And that is what set our Sauvignon Blanc aside from everyone else. So, that is what everyone was focusing on. Using yeast in winemaking techniques that maximized that flavor compound. (Interview with a winemaker, September 17, 2017)
The global success of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc has, in turn, led to Sauvignon Blanc production techniques being remodeled towards the “New Zealand style” in other regions as well. With the explosion of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc in that style, there has been a lot of investment from wine yeast producers. Mostly, they are based in France and Germany. They have spent a lot of time and effort in isolating yeast strains that show high degrees of conversion of thiol. And then, looking at doing it specifically for the New Zealand market and also for those people that are trying to emulate New Zealand style outside of New Zealand, like Chile or even the South of France. (Interview with a winemaker, 17/09/2017)
The 1985 Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc “sent a ripple through the international wine world” (Cooper, 2002: 214 in Howland, 2014: 18), receiving rave comments from global wine judges who described its consumption as “like hearing Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg variations, or seeing Niki Lauda at full tilt” (Cooper, 2002: 14 in Howland, 2014: 18). Crucially, this international attribution and objectivization of quality has stabilized the specific Sauvignon Blanc wine style, setting it as the world’s benchmark (Pütz et al., in press). As a vineyard operations manager of Cloudy Bay put it: I don’t think we’ve actually ever tried to change our style. What happened in the original days of Cloudy Bay is that they produced a very good wine that attained a great deal of recognition, and was considered to be the benchmark. And I think, we just try to achieve that benchmark every year. Because it became such an iconic wine, ever so written about. (Interview with a vineyard operations manager, 19 September 2017) So, when you’re dealing with wine judges or critics, you know, we may not show our back-channel wines to too many people, but when we are getting to taste it, for example a 15-year-old Sauvignon Blanc from Cloudy Bay, they’re just blown away by it. And they appreciate it, and then that’s how the word gets around. That’s how the mystique of the wine grows, when these guys write about or talk about it in their circles. You build that whole reputation and aura of the product. You don’t have to go out and publicly broadcast all the time. (Interview with a vineyard operations manager, 19 September 2017)
Fine wine and the regional contextualization of qualification
The Parker ranking, which has profoundly altered the wine market, is without doubt the most prominent example of a truly global impersonal judgment device. Nevertheless, wine rankings are not necessarily global in outline and reach. South Tyrol, Italy’s northernmost wine region, which until the 1980s was characterized mainly by table wine production, helps to demonstrate the geographically contextualized nature of quality attribution and stabilization. What qualifies as Italian fine wine is strongly influenced by wine guides that have emerged since the 1980s: five of these dominate the Italian market, of which the I Vini di Veronelli and Gambero Rosso’s Vini d’Italia guide are the most influential. While guides have begun to play a key role as impersonal judgment devices in Italy, too, the influence of the international guides, in contrast with France, is still not very significant. South Tyrol, one of the smallest Italian wine regions in terms of hectares of production area, has figured and still figures prominently in Gambero Rosso’s Vini d’Italia guide, with many wineries having received three glasses for their wines—the highest distinction of the Gambero Rosso (Rainer et al., 2019a).
While South Tyrol was a red wine region until the early 1990s, today white wine production outweighs that of red wine. At the same time, many wineries have changed their supply channels: until the 1980s, export to Germany, Switzerland and Austria dominated; since the 1990s, most South Tyrolean wines are sold in Italy (Rainer et al., 2019a). As one winemaker who has won three glasses in the Gambero Rosso guide over a number of years said: At the end of the 1980s, I approached a new market—that was the Italian market. That has really been the success. In the Italian market, we were able to gain reputation in terms of white wine, but through Italian food and wine [English in original] we also became known in export markets. I would say that in the German market we gained more reputation—I actually should not say that—through Made in Italy [English in original) than through South Tyrol. (Interview, 7 Dec 2016)
On the other hand, new consumers had to be attached “to products whose qualities have progressively been defined with their active participation” (Callon et al., 2002: 212). South Tyrolean wineries and oenologists participating in Italy’s most important wine events, establishing contacts and contracts with Italian wine distributors, have been crucial to the process of supplying the Italian market. “Establishing personal contacts with Italian sommeliers, opinion leaders [English in original] and journalists has been very, very important […]. We had to learn how the Italian market works” (Interview with a winemaker, 7 Dec 2016).
The many awards that South Tyrolean wineries and wines have received from Gambero Rosso’s Vini d’Italia have played an important role in attributing and stabilizing the quality of the region’s wines on the Italian market. 5 “In 2000s we were the first and only cooperative—and that’s still true—that was awarded winery of the year [by the Gambero Rosso guide], and that has provided us with a tremendous upsurge. Within one year I think 25% more revenue, so huge, and that opened us the doors to the best businesses in Italy” (interview with a winemaker, 7 Dec 2016). The work that South Tyrolean producers invested in changing the intrinsic and extrinsic qualities of their wine products to attach their wines to Italian consumers indicates that the awards from the Gambero Rosso wine guide have not been a (surprising) discovery of a previously almost unknown Italian wine region. The reflexive, geographically contextualized qualification of South Tyrolean wine for the Italian market has actually made the product suit the requirements for receiving those awards.
The importance of wines’ places for placing wine
Qualifying wine through the organization of wine’s production spaces
By combining wine with exclusive architecture and art, these aesthetic goods can create mutual alliances in terms of the attribution and stabilization of quality, because they all convey a certain social status (Aspers and Beckert, 2011; Bourdieu, 2000[1984]; Veblen, 2007 [1899]). In her study on the spaces in which fashion is displayed and consumed, Crewe (2016: 524) argues “that the boundaries between art, fashion, creativity, and what is institutionalized as such have been breaking down or at least becoming more porous in recent years.” The micro-geographies of the winery in which wine is displayed, tasted and consumed could arguably be added to that. The combination of art, exclusive architecture and wine in the assembling of winery spaces is a truly global feature of wine’s qualification that has gained strong importance in all three case study areas discussed in this research.
The work of associating fine wine with its production sites is frequently paralleled by processes of dissociating (Ibert et al., 2019) aspects of the production context. In New Zealand’s Marlborough region, for instance, the (industrial) production sites have frequently been spatially detached from the estates’ visitor centers and tasting rooms. While many Marlborough-based wineries which aim to position (some of their) wine brands in the upmarket segment produce their wines in a district in the south-west of the town of Blenheim, their visiting centers are kilometers away from this production site. The production facilities cannot be considered “dark sides” (Ibert et al., 2019: 57) in the sense that consumers would condemn them as unethical, but they run counter to conveying an image of fine wine production as a small, traditional and highly locally specific practice. Thus, they are spatially dissociated through being “purposefully placed beyond the consumers’ view and consciousness” (Ibert et al., 2019: 57). While large cooling tanks and high-tech production facilities dominate in the wine production district in the south-west of Blenheim, the visiting centers and tasting rooms are dispersed outside of the town in the rolling hillsides surrounded by vineyards (Pütz et al., in press). These cellar doors—even though their key attraction is to immerse guests in the world of wine through tours and tastings—only host very few, if any, parts of the production process. Only the production stage that is most directly associated with the attribution of aesthetic quality—wine aging in barriques—is elaborately arranged there. Hence, geographies of qualification in the global fine wine market are not only about associating wine with exclusive estates but also about dissociating certain aspects of wine production, such as industrial manufacturing spaces or landscapes of large industrial monoculture.
As Callon et al. (2002: 201) stresses, “consumers are just as active as the other parties involved […] in the process of qualifying available products […] [as] it is their ability to judge and evaluate that is mobilized to establish and classify relevant differences.” A South Tyrolean winery owner who invested a significant amount of money and effort in totally renovating his wine cellar put it this way: “The aesthetic of the cellar is absolutely insignificant to the quality of the wine. But in the heads of the consumers it is not. They want to see the cathedrals” (interview, December 16, 2016). He further explains that (unintentionally) overhearing visitors complain about the aesthetic has been crucial in prompting him to refurbish it. Thus, the way consumers imagine fine wine production sites should look like has been decisive in the way he decided to qualify his wines.
Since the 2000s, dozens of South Tyrolean wineries have completely redesigned their winery buildings using extravagant architectural concepts (Hempel, 2016). On the one hand, wineries are visited (and judged) by tourists who (can) subsequently become clients, as well as important personal judgment devices for potential visitors and wine consumers. On the other hand, extravagant wineries are frequently visited by wine importers and (wine) journalists and figure prominently in the diverse array of wine magazines, key market devices for attributing and stabilizing wine quality. The combination of exclusive architecture, art and wine production singularizes wineries and—for example through reviews or rankings in wine guides—at the same time provides comparability (of course, only within the exclusive field of aesthetic goods). 6 Wineries are thus key “sites of valuation” in the global fine wine market (Hutter and Stark, 2015). Professional market intermediaries generally visit them during temporal frames that are predefined and arranged with the respective wineries, and much of the wines’ value is created (or destroyed) during these specific “moments of valuation” (Hutter and Stark, 2015). Wineries are well aware of the importance of this: “We have a lot of incoming at our winery. A very good reception of clients, such as wine importers, is key. We have an important budget to host them; they do not have to pay anything when they are visiting our winery. That money is well worth it” (interview with the head of commercialization and marketing of a South Tyrolean cooperative winery, November 11, 2016).
At the same time, the manufacturing sites of other agricultural products such as olive oil, cheese or whisky—examples include the Portuguese olive oil mill Oliveira da Serra, the Turkish cheese factory The Farm of 38° 30° and the Scottish whisky distillery Macallan—have increasingly been associated with exclusive architecture and art. The director of the Scottish distillery Macallan, whose building was recently redesigned at a cost of £140 million, said that the “building’s design was in part inspired by images of some of the greatest wineries in the world” (https://fortune.com/2018/05/23/macallan-whisky-distillery-scotland/; accessed November 21, 2019). This underscores the argument that we are currently experiencing an aestheticization of everyday life and consumer products (Aspers and Beckert, 2011: 31; Ibert et al., 2019; Reckwitz, 2017; Rössel and Beckert, 2013) and that, concerning the agri-food market, the modes of fine wine qualification seem to be influential in this respect.
Qualifying wine through storytelling: place, exclusivity and rarity
In the fine wine market, as is the case for aesthetic markets more generally (Karpik, 2010; Reckwitz, 2017), storytelling is crucial for singularizing wines, and those stories are probably even stronger than in the case of other aesthetic markets, intimately tied to places of origin (Pütz et al., in press). As one winemaker from New Zealand put it: If I was to go out into the market and promote a pinot, I would always want to start with a story. Something that separates it from the other pinot noirs. Whether that’s the vineyards, whether that’s soil profile, whether that’s the wild yeast that we use in the fermentation process, or the type of oaks we use. And, then the next thing, at the higher end, would be exclusivity. The high-end pinot noir consumer, they want to hear stories and they want to feel that what’s in the bottle is very exclusive, both in terms of rarity but also in terms of how it’s made, and coming from a special place that they can relate to. (Interview, September 16, 2017)
As with other aesthetic goods (Crewe, 2016: 514; Karpik, 2010; Reckwitz, 2017: 127), narratives of exclusivity and rarity are key in the fine wine market. Bodega Colomés’ Altura Maxima Malbec for example—marketed as the wine from the world’s highest estate—is not only singularized by altitude but also its exclusivity and rarity are stressed: coming from an estate founded in 1831 and limited to six barrels, as the wine label of the 2012 vintage recounts. Thus, singularity goes hand in hand with rarity.
Fine wine producers have adopted different strategies for creating and maintaining (an aura of) exclusivity and rarity. One way is to sell off wines/grapes that are not considered good enough for a premium brand. As a vineyard operations manager of Cloudy Bay put it: “At Cloudy Bay, we only have one Sauvignon Blanc label. So, you [referring to the grape growers] either have to be good enough to get your fruit into that label, or, we sell it off as a bulk wine to someone else and they produce it. We don’t have a second label that we can throw additional fruit into” (interview, September 19, 2017).
South Tyrolean cooperatives have adopted a different strategy to sell off wines from grapes that they do not consider good enough to be sold under their cooperative wineries’ name. Grape-growing members of South Tyrolean cooperatives have to hand all grapes harvested over to their respective cooperative and, in turn, cooperatives have to accept all grapes harvested by their individual members. Against that backdrop, cooperatives have established strong internal differentiations of wine brands. This is mirrored by significant differentials in the grape prices that individual growers receive from the cooperative, depending on the brand of wine which the respective grapes are to be made into (which also reflects more work in the vineyards, stricter controls, etc.; see also Rainer et al., 2019a). As an additional strategy, cooperatives sell some of their wine through a second-order sales cooperative, an umbrella organization made up of five cooperatives. Crucially, this allowed them to commercialize those wines while at the same time dissociating them from their individual winery brands, hence preventing them from suffering a loss of image. This dissociation with brand identity is particularly important when selling wines to German discounters, who are the key players in the global bulk wine market (Rainer et al., 2019b). As one winemaker from a South Tyrolean cooperative put it: “When Aldi wants some of our wine and the price is OK and they then put any other label onto the wine, one which does not show the name of our winery, then we can talk about that—in case I have some wine left. But I do not want our wine to appear with our label, logo and image in the discounter. Not even with our large wine brands” (interview, 7 Dec 2016).) Hence, to build and sustain an image as a premium winery, the cooperative aims to establish a “relational distance” (Ibert et al., 2019: 54) from retailers whose image in terms of the wines they sell is the opposite. Cooperative wineries have the additional challenge of being thought of as a high-volume mass-production operation in Italy. Hence, dissociating themselves from this image has been important, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s, when they targeted Italian consumers with their wines and implemented the strong internal differentiation of wine brands. “The first thing we did [in the late 1990s] was to give up our cooperative name—except in situations where we had to put it. So, we renamed ourselves simply as winery. Cooperative just still does not sound great” (interview with a winemaker from a South Tyrolean cooperative, 7 Dec 2016).
Qualifying wine through terroir: The geographical spread of an idea and its contestation
The idea of terroir—namely that geophysical conditions (particularly soil and climate) and inherited, local winemaking knowledge give wines a specific flavor characteristic—is strongly associated with the French wine industry. Through a convention theory lens, Carter (2018) shows that the price premium that French wines can achieve is primarily related to political work: the strong institutional regulation of terroir (mainly through the 1855 Bordeaux classification and the 1935 Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée—AOC) united different actors in the supply chain and helped to carve out a critical market advantage compared to premium wine producers from other countries. Without a doubt, the excellent reputation of wines “Made in France” is strongly linked to this political institutionalization of the terroir concept. 7 As Anderson et al. (2017: 17) show in a recent statistical compendium of the global wine market, France still achieves the highest unit value (in US$/liter), followed—at some length—by New Zealand.
While French producers have to meet clearly defined criteria (e.g. with respect to yields, grape varieties, wine processing) to be entitled to use a certain AOC, in many New World wine regions it is commonplace for wine producers to make reference to place and single vineyards without having to comply with winemaking restrictions. New Zealand, for example, only officially registered its first 18 geographical indications (GIs) for wines and spirits in 2017. In contrast with the French appellations, New Zealand’s GIs solely regulate the idea that the quality of wine is attributable to its geographical origin and that at least 85% of the wine must be harvested in the indicated geographical area. Moreover, the remainder of the wine has to be made from grapes harvested in New Zealand. While GIs are new in New Zealand, associating wine with place is not (Overton and Heitger, 2008; Overton and Murray, 2014). The Cloudy Bay winery not only played an important role in positioning the Marlborough wine region on the global fine wine map, but the brand also stands for intensive, fruit-driven Marlborough/New Zealand wines. As Hunter’s wines, another premium winery which was key in positioning New Zealand on the global fine wine map after winning various important awards in the early days of Marlborough’s wine industry development in the 1980s, puts it on its homepage: “Our story is the story of Marlborough wine” (www.hunters.co.nz, accessed 11 Sep 2018). The examples show that brand building of individual wineries and place brand building frequently go hand in hand in the global fine wine market.
With the World Trade Organization agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the idea that the quality of certain goods is attributable to their geographical origin became legally anchored on a global scale. As a consequence, what Overton and Murray (2016: 8) have called a “race to place” can be observed globally—the rapid increase of geographical indications attached to more and more (mostly) agricultural products in a growing number of regions. In the wine market, “GIs became a marketing concept that spread rapidly from the Old World to the New and from smaller established artisanal producers (and their associated buyers and negotiants) to global corporations” (Overton and Murray, 2016: 9).
It is particularly GIs’ role in objectifying wines, in the sense of disentangling them from the complex relations that have produced them and attributing them certified and hence (externally) controlled and monitored qualities (Çalışkan and Callon, 2010: 8–9), which is key. As a representative of the South Tyrolean consortium that is responsible for the Denominazione di origine controllata (DOC) regulation in the region recounted: The key norm of the DOC regulation is the restriction of production. The limit of DOC is approximately 130 hundredweights, and we know that last year on average 90 hundredweights per hectare were harvested in South Tyrol. So already for a long time we have been well below the DOC regulation due to internal regulations within businesses. Notwithstanding, DOC is a quality mark for consumers. So we established a frame that only vigna could be inscribed that are named in the land register, so no fantasy names. So historically a vigna is part of a landscape. Those areas could be enlarged, but of course they had to be climatically, geologically and morphologically identical—to a certain extent. Also grape varieties are regulated. And they had to be economically exploitable. We did not want to create hotchpotches. (Interview with a representative of the South Tyrolean wine consortium that is responsible for the DOC regulation, 26 May 2017)
Many South Tyrolean wine cooperatives are rather critical of these vineyard classifications, not least due to the internal difficulties of applying them. Cooperatives usually consist of hundreds of small individual grape growers (whose vineyards are frequently less than a hectare in size) from different localities, and thus it would be a difficult process, fraught with internal challenges, for them to demarcate particular vigna and create wines made exclusively from grapes from these specific plots. Hence, the standards of GIs/appellations “which keep the processes of singularization going” (Reckwitz, 2017: 20) are important socio-political negotiation arenas. Even though (through the TRIPS agreement) the general idea that the quality of certain goods is attributable to their geographical origin became legally anchored on a global scale, the way this idea is actually employed still varies greatly between wine countries/regions, and is controversially debated within them.
Conclusion
Recent work in economic sociology has addressed the question of how products’ qualities are attributed, objectified and arranged, as well as the role of diverse socio-technical devices in this process; however, this research only tackles the spatialities of qualification processes in passing. In an effort to address this gap in the literature and thereby contribute to an economic geography of aesthetic markets, this paper has focused on the geographies of fine wine qualification.
The paper has shown that impersonal judgment devices (Karpik, 2010) such as wine magazines, guides and rankings have not only profoundly reshaped the wine market in terms of which wines (potentially) qualify as fine wines. By comparing and singularizing wines across the diversity of regional contexts, these devices have also played a key role in co-constructing a truly global fine wine market, challenging Europe’s monopoly and positioning some New World wine regions on the global fine wine map. Through wine critics and rankings, certain regional wine expressions such as “New World Style” Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc have been stabilized, reflexively leading producers in those regions (as well as producers copying these styles elsewhere in the world) to produce wines that fit this style (and the quality attribution related to it). To achieve the particular Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc style, a high degree of thiols is key. This has led to experiments with yeast by winemakers and yeast producers alike, and thus shows the collaborative effort of humans and non-humans in creating a wine style that has been stabilized (and copied) as a singular, regional expression of wine.
With fine wine, art and exclusive architecture all being aesthetic goods, combining them in the micro-geography of the winery is a (globally employed) means for wine producers (as well as artists and architects) to confer the status of their products and singularize them. Professional market intermediaries such as wine importers and wine critics usually visit wineries during pre-agreed visits, and much of the wines’ value is (potentially) created during these occasions. The (exclusive) designing and ordering of wineries—with these physical spatial settings being key “sites of valuation” (Hutter and Stark, 2015)—as well as the careful arrangement of visits thus play an important role in attributing wines symbolic quality. In agreement with Ibert et al. (2019), it is crucial—particularly in aesthetic markets in which associations such as those between art, fashion and architecture (Crewe, 2016) are generally at the forefront of discussion—not to overlook dissociations. Just as associations are key for framing wine as fine wine, so too are dissociations—they are key for setting it apart from its opposite: table wine. For instance, wineries aiming to position wine brands on the fine wine marketplace certain components of the production process (e.g. chemical laboratories) beyond winery visitors’ view and sell off parts of their production (considered not good enough to put the wineries’ label on them) as bulk wine to companies that then sell it under their label. The entanglement between the fine wine and table wine market, which becomes particularly clear in the previous example, requires disentanglement: the framing of exclusivity and rarity. Thus, looking at the geographies of dissociation and association provides a promising pathway for economic geography to analyze how aesthetic markets are enacted and bounded.
For the fine wine market, a global “race to place” as the key quality attributer can be observed (Overton and Murray, 2016: 1), the most striking example being the growing importance of geographical indications and their legal anchoring (globally, nationally and regionally). This is how the norms for singularizing wines through attaching them to geographical origin (from fine-grained vineyard designations to national appellations) are set. Geographical indications objectify wines through attributing them standardized, certified and monitored qualities and, at the same time, “keep the processes of singularization [through geographical origin] going” (Reckwitz, 2017: 20). Due to their importance, setting and defining standards for geographical indications (delimiting soils and areas, defining the percentage of grapes which have to be harvested in the indicated area, determining which grapes can be cultivated, defining a maximum of harvestable grapes per hectare, etc.) are far from technical but are rather key socio-political matters within and between different global wine regions. To investigate the contested, spatially variegated processes of setting standards for defining and regulating how goods can be rendered singular—as paradoxical as this might seem at first glance (Overton et al., 2016; Reckwitz, 2017)—thus provides a promising avenue for an economic geography of aesthetic markets.
The rapid diffusion of GIs, not just for wine but also for an increasingly diverse set of agro-food products including ham, cheese, tea, cigars, oil and potatoes (see Overton and Murray, 2016: 10 for a long list of concrete examples) can be seen as an indication of aestheticization processes within agri-food markets more broadly (see also Ouma, 2015: 37). The modes of qualification in the global fine wine market seem to be influential in these processes, as testified by the many examples of extravagant architectural agri-food production facilities beyond just wineries. While many standards and socio-technical devices such as the TRIPS agreement and wine rankings (e.g. Decanter, Gault Millau or Robert Parker’s The Wine Advocate) are designed to perform a global fine wine market, it is crucial not to overlook the regionally contextualized nature of wine qualification processes. National/regional fine wine markets differ profoundly in terms of (historical and contemporary) production and consumption profiles. Reflexively, for wine producers and market intermediaries, geographically contextualizing their qualification and requalification strategies is key. Hence, attaching “consumers to products whose qualities have progressively been defined with their active participation” (Callon et al., 2002: 212) presents a task that is not only highly reflexive and dynamic but also profoundly geographical.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The paper greatly benefited from comments from Christian Steiner, Robert Pütz and three anonymous reviewers. Additionally, I would like to thank participants of the Global Conference on Economic Geography in Cologne in 2018 and the Neue Kulturgeographie meeting in Eichstätt in 2019 for feedback on earlier versions of the paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.