The Globalization of Wine by David Inglis;Anna-Mari Almila;

Author:David Inglis;Anna-Mari Almila;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Globalization in the productive arena: Flying winemakers and their signature

More often than not, producers’ attachment to their wine takes the shape of a visceral link. This link became a threatened paternity when the exogenous figure of the wine consultant recently came into the foreground (Chauvin 2010b). The signature of wines by external ‘winemakers’ is a recent phenomenon in French vineyards, which has developed since the 1980s and 1990s in the New World countries (Lagendijk 2004; Williams 1995). If they are, in their role as production consultants, insiders of the wine world, their public and media visibility make them important characters of the wine field, and even sometimes of the wine culture too. This is a potential source of friction, especially in the Bordeaux region, where the division of labour was traditionally organized within the winery, and where the name of the growth used to override the name of the individuals who made the wine.

There are some elective affinities between the development of consultancy activities in the wine world and the capitalistic transformations of Bordeaux wine estates. Many family-owned growths have been sold during the last thirty years. These transactions have had some effects on the organization and strategies of producers. New investors coming from banks, insurance and financial groups, as well as some successful entrepreneurs, sportspeople and top-level executives, came to acquire some wine estates without any deep knowledge of the sector and, above all, without skills in viticulture management. Hence they often hire consultants to improve the technical work and the external communication.

Before the appearance of such consultants, the only name that was put forward apart from the name of the wine or the estate, was the name of the owner, in order to celebrate the prestige and the continuity of the winemaking family. Nowadays the signature has become the target of a symbolic and economic struggle between the different actors involved in the wine world. The names of the producer, the consultant and even sometimes the name of a famous ‘sommelier’ recommending the wine, can be displayed on wine labels, but this sort of public signal does not concern the most prestigious wines. The ranked growths, whose status has long been closely linked to the institutions and professional structures of the Bordeaux wine world, do not need such explicit external reputation sponsors. It does not mean that flying winemakers do not intervene in such wine estates, but the communication is much more discreet about their actions, and more often than not their signature is not mentioned in public. In this case, it is more a question of technical improvement of the winemaking than of being a communication tool.

One may consider flying winemakers as ‘entrepreneurs of reputation’ (Fine 1996) for middle-range wine estates: they enhance the reputation of the growth by associating their name with the product. The winemaker’s ‘signature’ represents a rising source of reputation for wines and growths. However, instead of putting into question the role of ‘terroir’ and official rankings in the building of prestige, the

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