Wine Markets: Genres and Identities

Abstract

The world of wine encompasses endless variety. Consumers want to understand what makes one bottle of wine different from another; vintners need to know how to communicate what makes their product distinctive. Winemakers also face a fundamental choice: produce an existing style and develop an identity as a proponent of tradition or embrace foreign, new, or emerging categories and be seen as an innovator. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France as well as interviews with critics and analysis of market data, this project develops the concepts of wine genres, shared understandings among producers and the public, to illuminate producers’ choices, whether they are selling traditional or nonconventional wines. Genres emerge through the social structure of production, including factors such as group solidarity, social cohesion, and collective action, and become key reference points for critics and consumers.