Creating Wine: The Emergence of a World Industry, 1840–1914 by James Simpson (review)

Creating Wine by James Simpson is an addition to Joel Mokyr’s excellent Princeton Economic History of the Western World. It is really two books in one.

The book is first a narrative of the emergence on a global scale of a specific industry with its many idiosyncrasies. Everything is there: cultivation techniques, wine making techniques, incidental exports, the deliberate development of export markets, relationships between productions in different areas, the multitudinous effects of vine disease (with due emphasis on the phylloxera epidemic, of course), changing prices, labor conditions, government regulations, the influence of politics on production, associated social movements, even consumer fads, and organizational changes within the industry. This first aspect of the book alone should make it required reading for anyone studying the wine industry, or simply working in or around it. It could play the part of a historical encyclopedia of grape growing, of wine making and of wine marketing that would be pleasant to read.

The book has a second face, one even more interesting than the first for someone—like this reviewer—who is only marginally interested in the wine industry as such.¹Creating Wine is an eminently readable, exceptionally well-documented longitudinal case study of capitalism. Or, rather, it is a study composed of several smaller, cross-national studies of capitalist development that hang very well together. Simpson catches capitalism in the act, so to speak. He describes how an economically marginal and locally oriented kind of resource extraction turned itself into a modern, capital intensive and export-dependent industry in less than one hundred years (alongside the better-known stories of capitalist transformation in iron, steel, railroads, and cotton.)

The book’s exquisite attention to detail seems straight out of Fernand Braudel. (Thus: The fact that many Spanish immigrants to Argentina came from non–grape growing Galicia limited the expansion of both demand for wine and the transmission of techniques in that country [258]). This thoroughness is well served by the ability of Simpson—a professor in at Universidad Carlos II in Madrid (Spain)—to exploit sources in four languages other than English.

I like to evaluate a scholarly book or article by answering these two questions: What’s the most important thing I learned from it? How important is the most important thing I learned from it? This book made me realize something I knew but did not know I knew, something that should have been near the forefront of my consciousness but was not. The insight is this:

In many cases, the growing of grapes and the making of wine allowed for the utilization of inferior resources. Grape vine thrives where little else grows. Vines can be tended largely at times and in places when and where employment is in short supply for rural populations. The elaboration of wine, the alcoholic beverage, requires only modest knowledge that is comparatively easy to transmit. (I refer here to the morphing of grape juice into a drinkable beverage that contains alcohol. I say nothing about quality.) Wine making is transformational capitalism for little people.

Considering the agricultural antecedents to modern manufacturing capitalism in Europe, it is easy to develop an alternative scenario in which the main productions of cereals and cattle are not supplemented by the production of wine (and derivatives). What emerges from this mental exercise is the picture of a significantly poorer European south.

Simpson demonstrates the comparatively swift globalization of the wine industry. He shows, in particular, the major role exports played in the development of national and local wine industries. He describes concretely how events in one place, such as the advent of the phylloxera pest in the Bordeaux region, quickly translated into a stimulus to the improvement of wine quality in other areas, such as Spain and Algeria (59). Simpson also tells in fine detail how nearly accidental transfers of technical competences carried by migrations (of often cheap) labor facilitated...