Bordeaux Wine Challenging Cycles and Competition (From the 1820s to Present times)

This chapter intends to follow the pulsations of growth (or of stability) that concerned the bordeaux wines since three halves of century. Classically international positions and market shares were at stake, while the accumulation of capital and the constitution and reinforcement of fortunes were also issues. These developments will focus on family and capitalist wine business, the rhythms of its development, the crisis it endured. Competition was an obvious determinant, but nature too, as yearly climate events and durable diseases attacks imposed dire restrictions to a stable life of vineyards. As in other economic activities, time was the issue: how did families, trademarks, and commercial positions resist these challenges? The very identity of bordeaux wines and brands was at the heart of this evolution as they could be challenged by competitors. Cooperative actions of brand-building and promotion, institutional communication, commercial practices were thus mobilized to assert the competitive advantages. Throughout these developments, an economical machinery took shape, specific to each pulsation of growth: the toolbox was comprised of vineyards, trade houses, brokerage houses, logistics levers, etc. A whole productive system (or cluster) (Henderson et al. in Collective resources and cluster advantage: An examination of the global wine industry, 2004) has been drawn up, which included several ranges of suppliers, among whom chemicals producers and traders, coopers, manufactures of tools and engines, house builders, etc. The very dimension of the bordeaux wine economy has therefore to be gauged all along such a history.