Geographies of Qualification in the globalised Wine Market

• Applicants: Privatdozent Dr. Gerhard Rainer, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Christian Steiner
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 455051919

In the last years, the number of social science studies on conceptual questions of quality has grown rapidly. This research project conceptually follows pragmatic, process-oriented contributions which conceive of quality as a result of controversial processes of qualification. Against that backdrop, the project proposes to study qualification processes in the global wine industry. The wine industry has experienced a rapid globalization process in the last decades which has led to a profound reconfiguration of value chains as well as to far-reaching transformations of wine regions in the Old and the New world of viticulture. We start from the assumption that globalization processes have important effects on the mechanism of wine qualification which, depending on the respective local to global embedding, can take different forms. As we conceive of qualification as a process that is always locally and regionally embedded in social relations and institutional settings but at the same time enmeshed in local to global relations, we speak of geographies of qualification. To be able to analyze the network of actors, technologies and devices that contribute to the qualification and requalification of wine, the project proposes a qualitative ethnographic study design. We follow the qualification and requalification processes of specific wines from the premium as well as from the bulk wine segment from the place of their final sale to consumers over market intermediaries, marketing departments, wine competitions, wineries etc. back to grape cultivation. For that purpose, it undertakes case stuidies in three different producer countries (New Zealand, Chile and Germany) and two of the largest win importing countries worldwide (Germany and Great Britain). The four case study countries have been selected because in terms of wine industry evolution, industry structure and regulation of viticulture they show strong differences but all of them have been intensively integrated into globalization processes. Their comparative analysis hence gives the opportunity of identifying locally and regionally bound as well as global geographies of qualification. The innovative character of the project consists of two approaches: Firstly, with the focus on geographies of qualification an underrepresented spatial perspective in social science debates is put at the center of analysis. Secondly, with pursuing the goal of identifying the mechanisms of qualification for premium as well as for bulk wine, the project can provide new insights into current discussions over standard- and status markets as well as over the aestheticization of consumer goods.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants