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. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France as
well as interviews with critics and analysis of market data, Giacomo
Negro, Michael T. Hannan, and Susan Olzak provide an unprecedented
sociological account of the dynamics of wine markets. They demonstrate
how the concepts of genre and collective identity illuminate producers'
choices, whether they are selling traditional or nonconventional wines.
Winemakers 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. To explain this
dilemma, Negro, Hannan, and Olzak develop the notion of wine genres, or
shared understandings among producers and the public. 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. Wine Markets features case
studies of the creation of a modern wine genre and a countermovement
against modernism in Piedmont, the failure of producers of Brunello di
Montalcino in Tuscany to define a clear collective identity, and the
emergence of the biodynamic wine movement in Alsace. This book not only
offers keen sociological insight into the wine world but also sheds new
light on the logic of markets and organizations more broadly.
