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After reading this intriguing book, a glass of wine will be more than hints of blackberries or truffles on the palate. Written by the author of the popular, award-winning website DrVino.com, Wine Politics exposes a little-known but extremely influential aspect of the wine business—the politics behind it. Tyler Colman systematically explains how politics affects what we can buy, how much it costs, how it tastes, what appears on labels, and more. He offers an insightful comparative view of wine-making in Napa and Bordeaux, tracing the different paths American and French wines take as they travel from vineyard to dining room table. Colman also explores globalization in the wine business and illuminates the role of behind-the-scenes players such as governments, distributors, and prominent critics who wield enormous clout. Throughout, Wine Politics reveals just how deeply politics matters— right down to the taste of the wine in your glass tonight.

The wine sector in Catalonia (Spain) is clearly dual: there are some big companies that contrast with the many small wineries that face difficulties to remain profitable. For these wineries, gaining access to the markets is of paramount importance. Our work explores the distributor's main business motivations, and the possibilities to pursue them in their business relationships with the wineries. To tackle this issue, we carried out a vertical differentiation of the service \"wine supply\" resorting to the Means-End Chain approach. Results show that a trustful relationship with the winery is the main central issue for wine distributors, while wine quality is the winery's key attribute. Furthermore, the winery's own will to access the market and to develop marketing strategies is also of great importance for the wine distributor. Key words: wine distributor, small wineries, marketing channels, Means-End Chain (MEC). En Catalogne, Espagne, la vitiviniculture est clairement un secteur a deux vitesses : d'une part, les grandes entreprises et, d'autre part, bon nombre de petits domaines qui peinent a maintenir leur rentabilite. Pour les petits producteurs, acceder aux marches reste un objectif prioritaire. Notre travail explore les principales motivations commerciales des distributeurs et les possibilites de les atteindre dans les relations commerciales avec les etablissements vinicoles. Pour aborder ce theme, nous avons realise une differenciation verticale du service \"approvisionnement du vin\" en utilisant la methode chaines moyens-fins. Les resultats montrent qu'une relation de confiance avec le producteur est le principal enjeu pour les distributeurs de vin alors que la qualite du vin est l'attribut cle pour le producteur. En outre, la determination du producteur a acceder au marche et a developper ses propres strategies de marketing est egalement tres importante pour les distributeurs de vin. Mots-cles: distributeur de vin, petits domaines vinicoles, circuits de commercialisation, chaines moyens-fins (CMF).

The promotion of symmetries between consumers and edibles could minimize adverse selection problems in the market. The question is how to align differentiated productive practices, organic or otherwise, with consumers in the global wine market. Or put another way, how to co-construct quality conventions to link the informative and symbolic functions of food products. Addressing these questions involves a detailed analysis of the construction of quality conventions in line with the investigations developed by pragmatic social theory (Teil and Hennion 2004). Authors like Teil (2011) and Hennion (2004) defend the objectivity of wine, understood as a multifaceted object derived from the practices and perspectives of the broad spectrum of actors influencing its value chain. These include not only consumers and producers, but also distributors, sommeliers, opinion-makers, and wine critics who endow wine with added value by articulating its symbolic function (Teil 2013). Exploring wine as a multi-faceted object requires investigating tangible and symbolic aspects of the product throughout the whole productive chain. To date few studies have explored the relation between the objectivity of wine (its organoleptic properties) and the productive processes behind it, and even less its relationship with the socio-cultural factors promoting their differentiation in the more subjective sphere of consumption.