Gradual Catch Up and Enduring Leadership in the Global Wine Industry

What has happened in the global wine industry is extremely interesting from a catch up point of view because the latecomers in the international market have radically changed how wine is produced, sold and consumed. Until the end of the 1980s the international market for wine was without a doubt dominated by European countries. But since the beginning of the 1990s this supremacy has started to come under attack due to the spectacular performance of new global leaders, which include affluent nations such as USA and Australia, and emerging economies, such as Argentina, Chile and South Africa. In this paper we aim at investigating the catch up cycle in the wine industry through a detailed analysis of export data. This analysis allows addressing issues related with the increasing share in the global market of countries from New World and relative decline of the Old World and the changes within these two groups. Having identified the successive stages in the catch up cycle, we focus on the successive windows opportunities, which have opened up in the wine sector. Finally, we investigate how the opening of these windows of opportunities in the market have generated important changes in the techno-economic paradigm and in the institutional settings of wine production initially mainly in the New World and then also among the Old World producing countries.