Wine Markets: Genres and Identities

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.

Table of Contents:
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Genres and Market Identities
2. Barolo and Barbaresco
3.The Barolo Wars
4. Mobilization of Collective Market Identities
5. Genre Spanning, Ambiguity, and Valuation
6. Brunello di Montalcino
7. Tradition, Modernity, and the Scandal
8. Alsace
9. Biodynamic and Organic Winemaking
10. Why Biodynamics? Category Signals and Audience Response
11. Community Structure, Social Movements, and Market Identities
12. Coda
Appendix: Data Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author :
Giacomo Negro is professor of organization and management and professor of sociology (by courtesy) at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. He is a coauthor of Concepts and Categories: Foundations for Sociological and Cultural Analysis (Columbia, 2019) with Hannan, among others.

Michael T. Hannan is the StrataCom Professor of Management emeritus in the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and professor emeritus of sociology at Stanford University.

Susan Olzak is professor emerita of sociology at Stanford University.

Review :
Using rich case studies of wine regions, Wine Markets demonstrates how collective identities emerge among producers. With its interesting mixture of detailed field data, historical knowledge, interesting anecdotes, and sociological ideas, I see this becoming a classic in economic sociology. A rich descriptive analysis of the emergence and evolution of new genres of wine in various regions across Italy and France... the book not only offers an engaging foray into the modern history of European wine but also provides significant theoretical insights to several research areas in both organization theory and strategy. At the end of the day, Wine Markets is a creditable culmination of a decade and a half of what was, I imagine, a delicious and rewarding research program.