Research pick: Wine, new and old vs emerging and established - "An update of the worlds of wine: the emerging countries’ influence"

The vanguard of emerging winemakers

For decades the primary division in the world of wine was between the “Old World” of European wines and the “New World” of North America, Australia ND New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere. There is a need to update this for the modern age where emerging nations are creating products to compete in the global market with the old vanguard.

Indeed, work published in the International Journal of Economics and Business Research, suggests that we should have a new division, not between old and new but between “developed” and “emerging” so that we can describe, analyse, and define wines with a 21st-century perspective rather than one borne of the colonial thinking of history.

Emiliano Villanueva of Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic, Connecticut, USA, and Gustavo Ferro of the Universidad del CEMA in Buenos Aires, Argentina, point out that for much of the past two millennia, wine was a European product. European imperial expansionism took the grape to the far corners of the globe, planting vines, and making vintners across the so-called new world. By 2006, production from the three original large-scale wine-making nations, France, Italy, and Spain, finally fell below 50 percent of the world market. As new world producers increased their market share and new old-world producers also made inroads. However, emerging nations have also been growing grapes and making wine for many years now, and their share of the market is increasing too.

The old versus new classification carries with it the bias of European colonialism and given globalisation and the rapid development of many nations with a penchant for wine, such as Chile and Argentina, a new system is needed. A new system that offers a demarcation between the wine production of developed and emerging nations would be useful, but perhaps only for a short time. The very nature of emerging and developing nations is their inexorable changing fortunes and circumstances that will ultimately lead them to be just as “developed” as the notion of developed versus emerging can be. Moreover, with climate change, the Mediterranean nations are not even the only ones in Europe making a lot of wine with England, Wales, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden all taking their place in the market.

We no longer need the division between old and new worlds but the proposed division between developed and emerging nations will be a transient theme. Perhaps the best division should simply be between established and emerging winemakers. But even then, perhaps worrying about the label has always been a poor way to choose wine. Wine should be chosen for its characteristics and fundamentally whether it is good or bad.

Villanueva, E.C. and Ferro, G. (2022) ‘An update of the worlds of wine: the emerging countries’ influence’, Int. J. Economics and Business Research, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp.113–129.