Book Review: Wine’s Global History

October 20, 2026 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, globalization, wine, wine history 3 Comments

Kathleen Burk, Wine: A Global History (Basic Books, 2026).

Kathleen Burk has written a big book (almost 600 pages) on an even bigger topic, the global history of wine. It is an impressive achievement that will please casual readers and reward detailed study. It is sure to become a standard reference for wine students of all stripes.

World Wine Web

The fact that this is not just a history of wine, but a global history is significant because it shapes how the book is organized and how its stories are told.

The story begins at the beginning, in Georgia’s cradle of wine, and extends from there as the wine world expanded. There are chapters on wine in Ancient Greece and Classical Rome followed by discussions of the growing European wine trade, with special focus on the Venetians, the Genoese, and the Dutch. A special feature is a chapter on the complicated relationship between Islam and wine.

The narrative moves on, examining key wine producing countries and regions. France gets two chapters, presumably because of its importance in the global story of wine, and the United States gets two chapters as well, because it is now the world’s leading wine consumer. Italy and Spain share a chapter. Germany has no chapter of its own, although it is obviously discussed in the historical surveys.

The global theme continues with a chapter on China and another that combines Japan, Korea, and Singapore. We trace the global expansion of wine through the Spanish Empire and then the Dutch and British Empires, before examining the impact of the Soviet empire on its wine-producing members (which takes us back to Georgia).

The book concludes with a chapter on The Contemporary World, which I found a bit disappointing. I suspect the problem is that I am very focused on the current crisis in the global wine industry while Burk, the history professor, takes a longer view of things.

Trade-Offs and Compromises

I’m impressed with how Burk has navigated the compromises and trade-offs inherent in addressing a big topic like this. I learned about the difficulties from personal experience a few years ago when I was given literally everything published in the New York Times during the 20th century and asked to edit the stories, editorials, photos, cartoons, and the rest into a history of the global economy.

The first problem, I learned was to know the facts. That was the easy part. Then I had to decide what to put into the book and what to leave out. That was hard because you can rewrite history easily simply by choosing to put this in and leave that out. But you can’t include everything. That’s just a fact.

I am impressed by Burk’s mastery of this topic (not a surprise, to be fair, since she is an emerita professor of history at University College London) and her skill in navigating the trade-off traps. I found her treatment of the topics I don’t know much about to be just right, full of information and insights wrapped into interesting stories. Reading material where I am very knowledgeable, however, was a different experience. I couldn’t help but ask why this and not that?

Forest vs Trees

I found the chapter on China the most interesting. I thought I knew something about the history of wine in China, but there was so much more to learn than I imagined. The same is true of the wine and Islam chapter. I’m going to go back to read these again because they are so interesting.

It is easy to experience the Forest versus the Trees effect in a book like this. The details are so interesting; how do they fit together? I think there are several important themes here. Perhaps the most important one is the tension between quantity and quality. If you break this down, it turns into a question about what wine should be and who it is for. Those are good questions to ponder, book in hand, with a nice glass of wine to sip, don’t you think?

Highly recommended.

Wine Book Reviews: Maps, Menus, and Much, Much More

October 6, 2026 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, climate change, globalization, wine Leave a comment

Brief reviews of two very different new wine books.

The World Atlas of Wine (9th edition) by Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson, and Julia Harding. Mitchell Beazley.

The 9th edition of The World Atlas of Wine is released today and it is an event worth celebrating. Much has changed in the wine world since 2019, when the 8th edition appeared. The new edition works hard to catch up and to look ahead, too, since the changes made now must remain relevant for the next few years.

The first duty of an atlas is to supply useful, interesting maps. Hugh Johnson, the founding author of this project, reports that it was often challenging to find any sort of maps for some wine regions back when he was creating the first (1971) atlas edition. But he did it and things have gotten better and better map-wise in the following years.

Julia Harding has taken over the map side of the project and has delivered an impressive collection of 240 detailed maps (18 of them new to this edition). That’s 240 maps within the book’s 432 pages! Add in the many photos and illustrations and you get a sense of the density of the visual information included here.

The maps might be what draws you into The World Atlas of Wine, but the text will hold you tight. Jancis Robinson and her talented team of regional specialists have thoroughly revised both the introductory material and each entry, too. The revisions are thoughtful, timely, and perhaps more thorough than you might imagine given the vast scope of this project.

If I have to single out one element for particular praise it must be climate change. Climate change shows up in its own introductory section along with a graph showing rising temperature trends and a map projecting changes in the geographic range of suitable Chardonnay vineyards. It shows up in expanded coverage of English and Welsh wine, where the effect of climate change is clear, and in a new section on Northern Europe that maps vineyards in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.

Climate change analysis is also seamlessly integrated into many of the individual country sections. You might not buy the book for its climate change coverage, but you can’t really avoid learning about and appreciating the importance of the topic.

The World Atlas of Wine is a vital reference for anyone interested in wine … or the world! The 9th edition invites and rewards detailed study. I can’t wait (although I will have to) to see what stories the 10th edition will have to tell.

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Wine & Dine at Home: Easy Recipes & Perfect Pairings by Charlotte Kristensen. Mitchell Beazley.

New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov recently asked “Have we forgotten wine’s place at the table?” and it is a timely question. Although we tend to think in the European way of wine and food as natural partners, that link is breaking down. It’s a problem for wine in general since it affects sales and a particular problem with what you might call “culinary wines” that really need food to show their potential.

Charlotte Kristensen’s new book Wine & Dine at Home wants to give readers the tools they need to discover or re-discover the magic of food with wine and wine with food. The book is organized in three parts called Discover, Pair, and Curate. I’d call them Theory, Practice, and Party.

Theory presents some principles for food and wine pairing. Brief sections explore Wine & Salt, Wine & Acidity, Wine & Fat, and so forth. Which wines work (and don’t work) with which properties. It gets a little complicated at times (most foods don’t have just one property, for example), but I like the way it encourages readers to think carefully about the properties of the foods and how they match or don’t match with wines.

The second section, which is the one that jumps out at you when you pick up the book, puts the theory into practice with 50 recipes and wine pairings. That’w where the “easy recipes & perfect pairings” subtitles come in.

Sue and I found that our attention was naturally drawn to the colorful recipe section, which takes up nearly half of the book. It was good to see specific pairing suggestions, but we had mixed reactions. Some pairings were very innovative and thought-provoking (although a few called for wines or ingredients that might be hard to get). Other combinations were almost clichés: Napa Cab and steak, Malbec and smash burger. Still we found a lot of ideas to inspire home experiments, probably starting with a tomato, bean, and squid stew paired with Barbera.

The final section suggests themed food/wine menus. I especially like the suggestion for a sort of tapas party. Lots of ideas here.

This book obviously isn’t going to reverse the growing gap between wine as food and wine as drink, but it might help. And the wine industry needs all the help it can get right now!

“Globalization versus Terroir” after 20 Years

September 23, 2025 By Mike Veseth in globalization, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine markets 4 Comments

“Globalization versus Terroir” is the title of my first published essay on wine economics. It appeared as a chapter in my 2005 book Globaloney: Unraveling the Myths of Globalization, which was the third in a four-volume series analyzing globalization and its discontents. (See list of books below.)

The wine world has changed a lot in 20 years and my thinking about the wine economy has changed, too, so I thought it would be interesting to re-read that first essay and see what I think about what I thought then. Here is a brief report.

Globalization versus Globaloney

The book Globaloney was conceived as a collection of case studies of how globalization was playing out in different industries. I had noticed that much of what we were told about globalization was based on a few vivid stories from specific industries, boldly generalized to global dimensions. So globalization is McDonaldization, for example, or Coca-Cola-ization. Globalization was almost always a bad thing and almost always centered in the United States.

I was suspicious that something as complicated as the global economy could be understood in such a simple way. And I knew from previous research that the search for counterexamples would be interesting. An earlier book, Selling Globalization, had argued against the prevailing wisdom that globalization was unstoppable. Global economics is built on global finance, I argued, and finance is fragile by nature. Critics doubted this conclusion until the Asian Financial Crisis and then the Global Financial Crisis. And then they didn’t doubt so much.

What’s really true about globalization? And what’s just “globaloney?” That’s what I was trying to figure out.

Globalization versus Terroir

I would like to say that everything I know about terroir I learned from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which is almost true. It is probably hard to imagine Smith, an austere Scot, sniffing, swirling, and droning on about vineyards and microclimates, but he did develop both knowledge of and appreciation for fine wine in his mature years and recognized the importance of what we call terroir.

Significantly, because after all he was Adam Smith, he noted the economic value of terroir, real or imagined, in establishing a winery’s or a region’s reputation. There was money in terroir then as there is today.

How does globalization affect wine terroir? Is it a McDonaldization situation, where the incentive to expand globally leads to homogenized products? Does the global mean the death of the local when it comes to wine?

I argued that while wine is a global industry, there really are not many truly global wine firms or dominant regions. Even Gallo, the largest wine producer in the world, has only a tiny share of total output and sales. Most wine-producing countries drink mostly their own products (a significant home-court advantage), limiting global effects.

Up the Wine Ladder

The impact of globalization on terroir seemed to me to depend on which step of the wine ladder you consider. At the bottom, basic commodity wine, there isn’t much terroir to lose (because that’s not what consumers are looking for). But globalization has had a big positive impact in raising the standard of quality of these wines by spreading winemaking knowledge and techniques and forcing bad local wines to compete with better wines from other regions.

The situation might be different at the top of the wine staircase. Winner-take-all global markets have the power to push the price of the best wines to stratospheric levels that Adam Smith could not have predicted. Great terroir wines are traded or collected, but not necessarily opened and enjoyed. A shame!

I also cited the Parkerization argument, which was very popular when the book was written. The growing global market put more power in the hands (and palates) of famous critics like Robert Parker, providing a powerful incentive for upwardly mobile winemakers to make at least one high-scoring “Parker wine.” If the top wines are all trying to please one critic, then won’t they all start to taste the same? That’s an unexpected globalization consequence for sure.

What about the wines in the middle, the ones that are neither commodities nor investment-grade icons? That’s the interesting question! I thought that product differentiation would be the key here because undifferentiated wines would sink toward the commodity bottom. Successful differentiation would allow for higher prices and margins. Looking back at this part of the essay I can see indicators of the premiumization trend that would gather force only a few years later.

Land versus Brand

What’s the secret to differentiation? Here’s where I made a mistake. Because I framed the chapter as globalization versus terroir, I naturally look to an increased emphasis on terroir as the key. So I was very hopeful about how things would turn out.

But, of course, terroir isn’t the only strategy. I should have paid more attention to branding as a strategic response to premiumization forces in the middle market tiers. I just wasn’t thinking land versus brand at this point. But I got there eventually (with the help of many wine people), which led to The Wine Economist and the five wine business books, starting with Wine Wars.

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Here are the books in my globalization series.

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Globaloney 2.0: The Crash of 2008 and the Future of Globalization (2010).

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Globaloney: Unraveling the Myths of Globalization (2005).

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The New York Times Twentieth Century in Review: the Rise of the Global Economy (2002).

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Selling Globalization: The Myth of the Global Economy (1998).

A Volta ao Mundo em 80 Vinhos Named Best Wine Book Translation

June 24, 2025 By Mike Veseth in globalization, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine, wine awards 5 Comments

The Portuguese translation of my book Around the World in Eighty Wines has received an award. A Volta ao Mundo em 80 Vinhos, published in Brazil by Editora Valentina, was named best wine book translation by Gourmand International. The book is available from the publisher as well as through the usual online sellers, including Amazon.com in the United States.

I am grateful to Gourmand International founder Edouard Cointreau and to the team at Editora Valentina. Special thanks to everyone who helped me write and publish the original book! Here is the Gourmand Awards press release.

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A Volta Ao Mundo em 80 vinhos – Best Wine Book Translation in the World

A Volta Ao Mundo em 80 vinhos, by Mike Veseth and translated by Editora Valentina, was named Best Wine Book Translation in the World at the Gourmand Awards, during the Cascais World Food Summit in Portugal.

The announcement was made on stage at the Estoril Congress Centre by Edouard Cointreau, President and Founder of the Gourmand Awards, who praised the work for its depth and cultural significance:

“Congratulations to Mike Veseth on the Brazilian edition of Around the World in Eighty Wines, a true masterpiece that blends travel, culture, and wine into a captivating global adventure. Inspired by Jules Verne’s classic, Mike takes readers on an unforgettable journey across continents, exploring the stories behind eighty wines that reveal not just the richness of terroirs, but also the spirit of the people and places that produce them. With insight, curiosity, and charm, he invites us to see wine not just as a drink, but as a lens through which to experience the world. A warm welcome to Brazilian readers joining this inspiring voyage!”

Founded in 1995, and with participation from over 200 countries, the Gourmand Awards are the only international competition dedicated to publications on food and drinks cultures. The competition is free and open to all languages. Each year, Gourmand organizes a global symposium in a location of notable gastronomic relevance, bringing together leading voices from the diplomacy, culinary, publishing, and cultural sectors.

The next world gathering of food culture professionals will take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during the Saudi Feast Food Festival, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Gourmand Awards.

Understudy to Center Stage: The Unexpected Rise of Cabernet Franc

December 17, 2024 By Mike Veseth in globalization, The Next Big Thing, wine, wine markets 9 Comments

Wine made from Cabernet Franc is generally paler, lighter, crisper, softer, and more obviously aromatic than that of its progeny, Cabernet Sauvignon.

This is how the authors of Wine Grapes, my standard reference, describe Cabernet Franc. Sounds great, doesn’t it? So it is a bit of a surprise that Cabernet Franc’s place in French wine is relatively limited.

France: Two Faces of Cab Franc

Cabernet Franc is the headline red wine grape in the Loire Valley, but in Bordeaux (and most other places) it is best known as a blending grape (or an insurance grape, I am told, because it buds and blossoms earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon and so helps winegrowers hedge their bets against unfavorable weather). Apart from Chateau Cheval Blanc and a few other BDX wines, Cab Franc is a backup singer behind Cabernet Sauvignon.

I think I first began to pay attention to Cabernet Franc about 15 years ago when I found myself helping Mike and Karen Wade on the bottling line at their Fielding Hills Winery (my report on the experience was the very first Wine Economist newsletter post). All the wines, made with grapes sourced from their Riverbend Vineyard on the Wahluke Slope, were great. But the Cab Franc really blew me away. It was then and remains now my favorite FHW wine.

Cab Franc was suddenly a thing to us and Sue and I started to wonder if maybe it was a Washington state wine thing. We got this idea from Chris Carmada, winemaker and proprietor at the Andrew Will Winery on nearby Vashon Island. Carmada said that Cab Franc might be Washington’s best red wine grape variety and Andrew Will makes the most of its exceptional quality in both their varietal wines and in the vineyard-specific blends.

This video tells the story of Andrew Will Winery and its particular affinity with Cabernet Franc. We also admire the elegant Cab Franc that Robin Pollard makes from her vineyard in the Rattlesnake Hills (a.k.a. “The Hills”) area.

Once we started looking for northwest Cabernet Franc we began to find it in unexpected places. The Rocks of Milton-Freewater is a famous AVA on the Washington-Oregon border. It is best known for the Syrah and Grenache wines that wineries such as Cayuse and Reynvaan make from the vines there. So we were surprised to find that Watermill Winery makes a terrific “Hallowed Stones” Cabernet Franc from their rocky estate vineyard, very different from Andrew Will, Pollard, or Fielding Hills. Distinctive.

Many Faces of Cabernet Franc

Looking further afield we stumbled across our first Napa Valley Cab Franc, the Ehlers Estate Cabernet Franc St. Helena, Napa Valley. Cab is King in Napa Valley, but Cabernet Franc is an unexpected discovery. This wine had the power and depth that you expect from Napa (15% abv, 18 months in oak) with the slight green edge that said Cab Franc not Cab Sauvignon. Sue liked it but said that the Napa style almost dominated the Cab Franc character.

Recently we’ve been learning more about the wine industries in Virginia and the Niagara Peninsula in Canada and discovered that Cab Franc plays important roles in both places. Barboursville Vineyards is probably our favorite Virginia winery (it was featured in my book Around the World in Eighty Wines) and its Barboursville Cabernet Franc Reserve is both great quality and great value.

Cabernet Franc is one of the most important red grape varieties for Niagara producers. We visited the region earlier this year and enjoyed tasting wines at Leaning Post Wines and Westcott Vineyards. Both focus on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, which do very well in that region, but both wineries also make exceptional Cab Franc wines inspired by the grape’s ability to express the character of particular sites.

The idea that Cabernet Franc is or could be a terroir wine — a wine that reflects its particular vineyard characteristics — comes as a surprise if you are used to thinking about it as a useful but secondary blending grape. Further study is required to explore this idea.

So we are starting to look for Cabernet Franc wines from Argentina. We know from our visits there that the differences in terroir, especially elevation, can be important. Malbec from Lujan de Cuyo can be very different from Malbec from the higher-elevation Uco Valley. So we are excited to taste the Durigutti Proyecto Las Compuertas Cabernet France (from Lujan de Cuyo) alongside the Bodega Andeluna Pasionado Cabernet Franc from Uco Valley vineyards situated at an even higher elevation 1300 meters above sea level.

Cab Franc World

It seems to me that Cabernet Franc has quietly exploded on the wine scene. Maybe it was always there and I just overlooked it. But maybe those qualities I found in Wine Grapes have become more important to wine drinkers. According to Wine Grapes, Cab Franc can be found almost everywhere: Northeast Italy, Spain, Romania, Hungary, Argentina, and Chile have significant plantings of the grape variety and there are patches of Cab Franc vines almost everywhere else. Even on Malta!

There is clearly a lot of work to be done to chart the Cab Franc universe. Once upon a time, Cabernet Franc was Cabernet Sauvignon’s shy understudy that has now taken center stage, at least some of the time. Either way, let’s celebrate Cabernet Franc.

What’s New? Portuguese Translation of “Around the World in 80 Wines”

August 20, 2024 By Mike Veseth in globalization, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine, wine tourism 5 Comments

The Portuguese translation of my 2018 book Around the World in Eighty Wines is here. A Volta ao Mundo em 80 Vinhos was released last month by the Brazilian publisher Editora Valentina. The new book is available from the publisher as well as through the usual online sellers including Amazon.com here in the United States.

What’s the book about? Well, here’s a brief excerpt from the summary to test your Portuguese language skills! (The English language summary can be found on the book’s Amazon.com page.)

Inspirado no clássico romance de aventuras de Júlio Verne, Mike Veseth nos leva à sua Volta ao mundo em 80 vinhos. A jornada começa em Londres, metrópole histórica da enologia. Logo viajamos pela França e pela Itália, para, em seguida, darmos uma guinada em direção a irresistíveis relatos sobre o vinho na Síria, na Geórgia e no Líbano. Toda taça de vinho conta uma história, e assim cada um dos oitenta vinhos aqui selecionados tem algo importante a revelar. Sem mais delongas, seguimos pela África do Norte até a Argélia, um dos maiores exportadores de vinho do mundo, e atravessamos o Mediterrâneo para chegar à Espanha e a Portugal. Acompanhando as rotas comerciais portuguesas, desembarcamos na Ilha da Madeira e depois na África do Sul, onde fazemos um rápido desvio para saborear o mais famoso Pinot Noir do Quênia. Como assim? Pinot Noir no Quênia? É isso mesmo? …

Authors don’t get rich from translation rights, but it’s exciting to see the new edition because it promises to expand the global audience for my book. Brazil and Portugal are important wine-producing and consuming countries and the Portuguese-speaking world is, well, worldwide. It seems like I find Portuguese and Brazilian influence wherever I go. Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, everywhere!

A Volta ao Mundo em 80 Vinhos is the third of my wine books to be available in translation. It joins “Вокруг света за 80 бутылок вина.” (the 2019 Russian translation of Around the World in Eighty Wines) and “Războaiele Vinului” the 2017 Romanian translation of the 2011 edition of Wine Wars,. on the Wine Economist foreign-language bookshelf.

“Obrigado” to Editora Valentina and my other international publishers for their creativity and hard work. Thanks, as well, to all the readers for their support.

Wine, Globalization, and the End of History

December 5, 2023 By Mike Veseth in globalization, Unified Wine & Grape Symposium, wine, wine history Leave a comment

I have been thinking a lot recently about how much things have changed since the 1990s and what the future might look like in this light. The event that has provoked this unexpected thoughtfulness is the upcoming Unified Wine & Grape Symposium, which will be the 30th edition of what has become North America’s largest wine industry gathering.

A Golden Age?

Looking back at the program for the first Unified, it is clear that the American wine industry was worried about the future. It must have seemed like obstacles and headwinds were all around. Problems in the vineyards. Rising foreign competition. And concerns about both government regulation and uncertain consumer demand. One session was titled “Who Isn’t Drinking Wine and Why.” That’s a question we are asking again today.

Looking back it is easy to appreciate these concerns (because they never really go away). What folks back then didn’t realize, however, is that they were in some ways at the start of a wine industry golden age. Baby boomers were entering peak wine-buying years. The economy was growing, fueling the rising interest in wine. The “French paradox” infused popular culture with the idea that wine (especially red wine) was actually good for you because of its role in the healthful Mediterranean diet. Wine made you feel good, it was good for you, and you could afford to drink it. What could be better?

Things have changed a lot since the 1990s and some of those changes contribute to the challenges that the industry confronts today (and that we will strive to address at Unified 2024).

The Globalization Effect

This makes me think about other ways the world (and the wine world) have changed over these 30 years. Globalization was gaining speed in the 1990s, for example. It was controversial (think NAFTA debates and the Seattle WTO meeting riots), but eventually (when China joined the WTO, for example) it was seen by many as an inevitable tide, an irresistible force.

No one thinks globalization is inevitable anymore. The Global Financial Crisis made investors aware of the risks of international market contagion. The supply-chain disruptions of the COVID era made “nearshoring” an awkward but understandable concept. And now political tensions and uncertainties have driven “friendshoring” trends.

Economic globalization hasn’t collapsed. But it is different. Globalization was a powerful force in wine in the 1990s, too, as patterns of production and consumption around the world shifted and international wine trade volumes rose. They kept rising, too, as the graph above (taken from the most recent OIV global wine report) shows, until about 15 years ago, when the volume of wine exchanged across borders reached a plateau. (Click here for a pdf of the OIV report).

The value of the international wine trade has continued to rise, as the graph below shows, due to the general premiumization trend. The pattern of global wine trade has changed, too, both in terms of shipping patterns (think the sharp Australia-China shifts) and the commodity composition of shipments (packaged goods versus bulk wine, for example).

The End of History Effect

One of the forces that powered economic globalization was the collapse of Communism, which opened up a world of trading and investment opportunities. We called it “The End of History” after the famous book by Francis Fukuyama. History was ideological conflict, Fukuyama argued, which was all over. The liberal order was the only story left to tell.

Wine had its own “End of History” in the 1990s, although it understandably got less attention. The history of wine was defined, more or less, by Old World notions of appellations and terroir. Burgundy was Burgundy and Pinot Noir made anywhere else wasn’t the same. Ditto for Bordeaux and Cabernet Sauvignon. New World producers might purloin Old World titles to market their wines (remember Gallo Hearty Burgundy?), but no one was fooled.

Jancis Robinson’s 1995 BBC television wine series was an important part of the movement to rewrite wine history. She didn’t organize her tour of world wine as you might expect — Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Rhone, the Loire. She sorted things by grape variety — Pinot Noir, Cabernet, Syrah/Shiraz, Sauvignon Blanc — and featured New World wines and producers alongside familiar Old World names.

Not everyone was convinced that the new history was valid. My favorite scene was where Robinson poured a glass of New World Pinot Noir and asked a famous Burgundy producer what she thought. The winemaker scowled at her glass and proclaimed that Oregon shouldn’t make something like this. They should find their own terroir, she said, invoking that mystical French phrase almost like a curse. Oregon on the same stage as Burgundy? It’s like the end of history. What next?

However, the curse was cast in the opposite direction. Not for the most famous names of Burgundy and Bordeaux, but for producers with less well-known names from less-recognized appellations. The fact that they were defined by their place turned out to be a disadvantage in the global wine world where grape variety was the new lingua franca. ( I am smiling at the irony of this phrase even as I type it.)

The baby boomer consumers that everyone was chasing didn’t grow up understanding appellations, but they rather quickly came to understand grape variety and to define their wine world that way. Thus the wines of emerging global powers New Zealand and Argentina became known for their signature grape varieties more than the particular regions that grew them. No one asked if France or Italy had a signature grape variety (a good thing, because they obviously don’t). But other regions asked the question themselves and decided that the lack of a grape of their own was all that was holding them back.

The End of History in terms of ideological conflict hasn’t exactly worked out. Old divisions have reemerged and new ones have arisen. There is plenty of conflict to go around and history endures.

History has returned to the wine world, too. Wine defined by grape variety was the great leveler and helped open up the world to wine. But today, with the market at a plateau, product differentiation is the name of the game, and claiming terroir is one strategy. AVAs are popping up all over in response.

Golden Age Worries

The golden age of the 1990s didn’t last for wine, but that’s how golden ages work. What’s interesting is that the golden age was already upon us before we realized it (and ended before we knew it, too).

I wonder what’s ahead for wine? My friend Kenneth Boulding used to say that history doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it stutters. Something to think about! Another golden age? Hard to see how the stars could align to make that happen. But I don’t think many people saw that golden age on the horizon either.

Wine and the Falling Dollar

August 29, 2023 By Mike Veseth in Economic impact, exchange rates, globalization, wine, wine markets Leave a comment

There are good reasons why it has been a while since I last wrote about wine and the dollar’s foreign exchange value. A lot of things have shaken up the pattern of wine sales here in the U.S. market, especially the channel-shifting that occurred during the covid pandemic and uneven return to what we laughingly call “normal.”

Many factors shaped the pattern of international wine imports and exports, too, especially supply chain bottlenecks that saw the cost of container shipments zoom up by a factor of ten (when you could find a container) and have now settled back down to roughly pre-pandemic levels.

Falling Dollar, Bouncing Dollar

The exchange rate has been a factor in the wine market through all of this, but it wasn’t really the important factor in most cases. The dust has settled enough now, however, that we need to think about the dollar’s value once again.

Although the situation can vary from currency to currency, the overall trend for the U.S. dollar in the last year has been down (see the graph above of the USD versus the EUR). The dollar fell sharply through the end of January and has bounced up and down a bit but has been in a downward trend since then.

A cheaper dollar makes imports more expensive since each greenback buys fewer units of foreign exchange. U.S. exports benefit because a cheaper USD means a lower cost to foreign buyers. It takes a while for the impact of an exchange rate change to be felt, but if the change is sustained, the impacts eventually come around.

Falling Dollar in Perspective

What should we make of the recent dollar decline? One good source of analysis is the Economist magazine’s “Big Mac Index” of currency values. The clever folks at the Economist have found that comparing the local currency costs of Big Mac sandwiches in different countries can provide insights into exchange rate conditions. Some currencies are “overvalued,” which means that they buy more Big Macs (and other stuff) abroad than they do at home. Market forces should push these currencies down in relative value over time.

That, more or less, is the story of the dollar in the last year. The dollar’s relatively high value encouraged some Americans to travel abroad and those who stayed home to buy lots of imports because the dollar’s strength made foreign things seem cheap. Inevitably, as they sold dollars and bought foreign currencies, the dollar fell in value relative to those currencies.

The dollar’s fall is a bit surprising because U.S. interest rates have been rising steadily this year and that usually creates an incentive for foreign investors to buy up dollars, offsetting the trade effects. But many other countries have boosted their interest rates, too, so the investment impact is less than you might expect. Perhaps the combination of the downward overall trend plus the periodic interest rate increases account for some of the trampoline bounce shown in the graph at the top of the page.

Where does the dollar stand today? As of August 3, when the Economist report went to press, the dollar was about four percent undervalued compared to the Euro, so it is not unreasonable to expect a bit of a bounce. It was seven percent undervalued relative to the Argentina peso, but I suppose that is using the semi-fictional official exchange rate. There is a special cheaper ARS rate for wine designed to encourage exports and of course, the black market rate is even lower.

Incredibly, the official ARS-USD exchange rate, which was approaching 300 pesos per dollar when the Economist report went to press, is now hovering around 350 peros per dollar after a sharp devaluation in response to destabilizing election results. (The exchange rate on the street is nearly twice as many pesos per dollar as the official number.) The graph below shows how quickly conditions have deteriorated for Argentina’s currency.

Over and Under

If the exchange rate isn’t a big factor in U.S. wine trade with Europe (but probably is a factor encouraging imports from Argentina because of the special exchange rate), then what about the rest of the world? The Economist study suggests that Southern Hemisphere wine producers have an exchange rate advantage when exporting to the U.S. market because their currencies are undervalued.

The New Zealand dollar, for example, is undervalued compared to the USD by 9.7 percent. This makes their popular wines even more competitive in the Sauvignon Blanc category, which is one of the few parts of the wine market that has experienced growth recently. The Australian dollar is undervalued by ten percent.

Undervaluation is the flip side of overvaluation. The currency is relatively cheap on the foreign exhange market, so foreign buyers get a good deal, but imported goods and services are more expensive. Both sides of the coin involve trade-offs. You get cheaper imkports if your currency is overvalued, but better export performance if it is undervalued.

Chile’s currency is undervalued by 16.7 percent in the Economist study, with the number for the South African rand an incredible 49.7 percent. Such large currency distortions are potentially very important in parts of the wine market where cost differences are critical.

Export Market Impacts

The analysis above has focused on how the exchange rate affects U.S. imports of wine, but it is important to note that American wine producers also compete with foreign producers (who also compete with each other) for exports to other countries, especially the Eurozone and Great Britain. The value of major southern hemisphere currencies is so low, if the Economist analysis is correct, that the dollar needs to fall a good deal more to make American wines competitive abroad. That’s not likely to happen.

What does the future hold? In the long run, over-valued currencies should fall in value and under-valued ones rise. But lots can happen long before the long run arrives, so don’t hold your breath. I will check in again on this topic when the next Economist report is released.

Two New Guides to Global Wine

October 4, 2022 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, globalization, wine 1 Comment

Two new guides to the global wine scene are scheduled for release next Tuesday, October 11 and this coincidence of release dates provides an opportunity to compare their different approaches and to consider the problems that such books necessarily confront today.

Hugh Johnsons’s Pocket Wine Books 2023 (general editor Margaret Rand) is the latest annual edition in this best-selling series. The new third edition of Wine Bible by Karen MacNeil is as big as Hugh Johnson volume is slender. Both books are jam-packed with information and insights. Both are addictive page-turners that reflect all the creativity, attention to detail, and pure hard work that has gone into their production. No wonder they are so successful.

A global wine guide has got to be exceptional to succeed these days. Consider the challenges that authors and editors face. First is the vast domain of the topic. Fifty years ago the world of wine was pretty big in theory, but much smaller than today in practice. New Zealand wines existed, for example, but you might not need to talk much about them. Who would ever encounter a kiwi wine outside of kiwi-land?

Now, of course, wine production takes place in more places and efficient wine trade brings an enormous number of the bottles to our doorsteps. More wines from more places made in more styles with more different wine grape varieties. Incredible.

How is a book supposed to approach such a huge topic? And how can a book compete with the internet, which can provide smartphone-equipped wine enthusiasts with vast storehouses of wine data? A physical book simply has to have a lot going for it to find a market in the smartphone era, don’t you think?

And then there is the problem of readership. Physical books and e-books there to be read, but more and more people want to listen to information instead of reading it. Podcasts and audiobooks are very popular today. When I checked the Amazon sales figures for my wine books back in August, for example, and I think the audio-book versions usually topped the tables.

My books might have had more listeners than readers during the peak summer weeks, but my books have lots of stories and so lend themselves to audio narration. Reference books and guides might not be as easy to transform from printed word to spoken voice.

You probably have earlier editions of both these books on your bookshelves, but it is worth considering their different strategies for capturing the world of wine in print.

The Hugh Johnson Guide takes a sort of pointillist approach, with lots and lots of very short entries in each of the major sections such as vintage reports, wine grape varieties, food and wine pairings, ten wines to try in 2023, and so on. The chapters on wine producing countries take the same approach, featuring lots of star-rated thumbnail producer reviews. The classic Old World regions — think Burgundy and Bordeaux — get special attention.

The Wine Bible takes a more broad-brush approach, with many of the same topics and topics covered, but in a more flowing narrative style with many of colorful illustrations. The Wine Bible encourages deep reading and focused study more than browsing. The Hugh Johnson chapter on Washington State, for example, has short sketches and star ratings of more than 60 wineries while The Wine Bible focuses on the stories of just eight iconic producers that help define the region. Both approaches are useful — it depends on what you are looking for.

Both books confront the inevitable question of where do you stop? The world of wine is so broad today, how much coverage should emerging countries and regions receive given the obvious constraints of the book format? There is no right answer to this question, but I admit that I was a little disappointed in the Hugh Johnson treatment of Asia and especially China, which received less space on the page than New Jersey. The Wine Bible’s treatment was more in line, in my view, of China’s current and potential position in the wine world.

The Wine Bible and Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book both have a lot to offer and much that is new. Wine enthusiasts are fortunate to have these great guides to global wine.

Wine Book Review: Britain, Imperialism, and the Wine World They Created

April 5, 2022 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, globalization, wine markets Leave a comment

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World. University of California Press, 2022.

Imperial Wine is a serious academic study of how imperial economic, political, and social relations between Great Britain and three of its colonies — South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand — shaped their wine industries and New World wine more generally from the time of the first plantings through to today.

This is an argument that I am glad to see examined in depth. In my books Wine Wars and the forthcoming Wine Wars II I nominate Great Britain as the center of the wine universe, so powerful, I think, is its influence on wine and the wine trade.

Australia and New Zealand were British colonies that developed wine industries that were shaped to a great extent by the ebb and flow of trade with the United Kingdom. Although South Africa and its wine industry have roots in Dutch colonial trade, the decades under British rule had powerful effects.

It is a fascinating study, but I admit that I struggled at times because I really wanted this to be a book about wine first and foremost and the author is really focused on imperialism, with wine used as a lens. I think that authors earn the right to define their works, so I cannot really complain. This is a story that can be told several ways.

Most people will be surprised at the poor reputation of Australian wines in the UK market in the early post WWII period, for example, given how popular they are today. There are many ways to demonstrate this, but the author highlights a lame Monty Python joke that compares and aroma of Aussie wine to the smell of an Aborigine’s armpit, which invites a discussion of imperial racist attitudes in the post-colonial era.

“Some wine lovers might protest that colonialism is a distant historical footnote to the history of wine, and that dredging up colonial history is a buzzkill, a weary intrusion on our enjoyment of wine,” the author writes in the concluding chapter, suggesting that she’s run into people like me before. “Can’t we just enjoy a glass of wine without someone introducing controversy? Is colonial history designed to make wine lovers feel guilty?” Imperial Wine, the author argues, makes the case that ignoring the history of wine distorts our understanding of both it and the complicated processes that have shaped it.

Fair point. Understanding the forces that conditioned what is in your wine glass, how it is made, and who it is made for deepens the wine experience, don’t you think? And that includes the forces of empire and the long shadow that they cast.

The author’s deep dives into historical documents drew me in again and again. During World War II, for example, Old World wine pretty much disappeared from store shelves, replaced for the most part by “colonial wines” from South Africa, Australia, and Algeria (not a British colony, but a colony nonetheless). The author traces changing wartime wine patterns though a study of the detailed records of the King’s College off-license store, called the buttery, which provided wine for fellows and sold it to students. Algerian red wine and South African sherry sold well to penny-pinching students, who would turn their backs on colonial wine after the war in favor of the French wines returned to the market.

Imperial Wine teaches wine enthusiasts about the role of empire in shaping the wine world of the past, present, and probably the future, too. And it teaches students of imperialism that the influence of those forces continues even in something as seemingly simple as a glass of wine.

Interesting. Well-written. Thought-provoking. I learned a lot. Did Imperial Wine change the way I think about wine? Yes, at least a bit. Well worth your consideration.

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Curry: A Tale of Cooks & Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham is one of my favorite books about cultural globalization. Imperialism is a strong force in this account (which includes historical recipes at the end of each chapter). I was reminded of Curry when I noticed that Collingham wrote one of the cover blurbs for Imperial Wine.