Creating Wine: The Emergence of a World Industry, 1840-1914

The Princeton Economic History of the Western World #36

by James Patrick Simpson

Today's wine industry is characterized by regional differences not only in the wines themselves but also in the business models by which these wines are produced, marketed, and distributed. In Old World countries such as France, Spain, and Italy, small family vineyards and cooperative wineries abound. In New World regions like the United States and Australia, the industry is dominated by a handful of very large producers. This is the first book to trace the economic and historical forces that gave rise to very distinctive regional approaches to creating wine.


James Simpson shows how the wine industry was transformed in the decades leading up to the First World War. Population growth, rising wages, and the railways all contributed to soaring European consumption even as many vineyards were decimated by the vine disease phylloxera. At the same time, new technologies led to a major shift in production away from Europe's traditional winemaking regions. Small family producers in Europe developed institutions such as regional appellations and cooperatives to protect their commercial interests as large integrated companies built new markets in America and elsewhere. Simpson examines how Old and New World producers employed diverging strategies to adapt to the changing global wine industry.



Creating Wine includes chapters on Europe's cheap commodity wine industry; the markets for sherry, port, claret, and champagne; and the new wine industries in California, Australia, and Argentina.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction, Business

360 pages, Hardcover

First published September 26, 2011

Reviews

[Samuel Peck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impressive data but drier and more unpalatable than a wine made with grape seeds.

[Erica]

I can't really give this book a rating, and it highlights why the 5-star rating system is so silly for so many books.

Simpson's book is a truly amazing feat of history, much like Hancock's recent Oceans of Wine. His global-scale narration of wine economy, production and consumption is beyond critique. The charts and graphs amassed here, along with every other form of industry fact in the second half of the 19th century, seem rather super-human.

And yet it's one of the most truly boring books I've read in years, and I'm a "historian," and I study grape culture. This boggles me. I guess the "historian" thing is where we fall out, because my work is all about culture and mythos, while his is numbers and industry--truly the opposite ends of the spectrum of the discipline. While I value his work, I don't know that it adds or changes human perceptions about wine in any larger way. I would guess that Simpson would not value my work at all, see it as fluff and fairy tale, not backedup by enough graphs. That's OK, but it also illustrates the extreme uphill battle I'll have getting my book reviewed positively, because it will be sent to standard wine historians and people in the wine business and wine industry, not to cultural studies people, whom it is written from and for. Anyway, his is a truly amazing work of history, one I will continue to use for its amassing of data.