Abstract
With a farm gate value in 2016 of US$68 billion, grapes are the world’s third most valuable horticultural crop (after potatoes and tomatoes). Cultivation of grapes for fruit and wine began at least 7000 years ago in the Near East, and over the millennia, thousands of cultivars have been developed and selected for particular purposes. Nowadays, grapes are grown all around the world, but mainly in places having a temperate, Mediterranean-style climate, and they are used to produce diverse consumer products including wine, table grapes, raisins, grape juice concentrate and distillate for various industrial uses as well as making fortified wine and brandy. The cultivars of grapes used to make these diverse products are likewise diverse, but a relatively small number account for the vast majority of production in each major category. Predominantly, European V. vinifera scions are grown on rootstock from phylloxera-resistant Native American species. Particular cultivars are valuable to farmers in particular applications for their agronomic traits and fruit-quality traits, which together determine the value of the crop and the cost of producing it. These values can be conditioned by consumer preferences for attributes of the production process and by government policies including trade taxes, alcohol excise taxes, and regulations over production practices or limiting yields. Evolving demands for traits create demands for work by viticulturists and other scientists to understand the grape genome and work with it.
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- 1.
In the preface to their book describing 1368 varieties of wine grapes, Robinson, Harding, and Vouillamoz (2012, p. viii) suggest the “total number of different vine varieties is about 10,000.”
- 2.
- 3.
We draw on various sources for data, including the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV), the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service (USDA/FAS), Anderson and Aryal (2013), and Anderson and Pinilla (2018). The Appendix provides more detailed data tables and some discussion of the different data sources.
- 4.
In this part, we consider data since 2000 from FAOSTAT (2018) for making detailed comparisons. While data are available for earlier years, they are less complete in terms of country coverage and less accurate for some countries, and more so the farther back we go.
- 5.
For example, Alston et al. (2018b) deduced that, of the total California crush volume, on average for the years 2000 to 2016, 14.5% was used for grape juice concentrate, 15.8% was fermented to make distillate, and 69.6% was used to make wine.
- 6.
Among other things, this outcome reflects efforts by producers to develop a reputation for the production of high-quality wines, sometimes through the development of collective “brands” associated with regions and varieties, as discussed later in this chapter.
- 7.
- 8.
The California Table Grape Commission (2018) refers to a total of 85 varieties currently in production and provides details on the top 17. http://www.grapesfromcalifornia.com/docs/2016-variety-chart-and-merchandising-guide.pdf.
- 9.
In 2016 in Napa County, the average yield was 7.9 tonnes/ha and the average crush price was $5155/tonne, almost ten times the average crush price in the Southern San Joaquin Valley where the average yield was 40.5 tonnes/ha. The other regions were distributed between these extremes with higher yields being generally associated with lower prices per tonne, as described by Alston et al. (2018a, b).
- 10.
- 11.
Tumber et al. (2014) estimated that the cost of Pierce’s disease in California was approximately $104.4 million per year, of which $56.1 million was the cost of lost production and vine replacement borne by grape growers, and $48.3 million was spent to fund Pierce’s disease activities undertaken by various government agencies, the nursery and citrus industries, and the University of California system. Alston et al. (2013) found that the cost to producers and consumers would be much higher in the absence of the Pierce’s Disease Control Program.
- 12.
While we have focused on pest- and disease- resistance traits in this section, the same issues arise in the development of new varieties that are more tolerant of environmental stresses such as heat, cold, or drought. We are also conscious of the fact that we have paid scant attention to the distinctions between traits that can be introduced through genetic innovations in rootstocks versus scions.
- 13.
In the European Union, at least, the current indications appear unfavorable. On July 25, 2018, the EU Court of Justice ruled that plants created with new gene-editing techniques should be regulated as genetically modified plants. While the market worldwide has accepted the use of non-vinifera rootstocks with V. vinifera scions, it remains to be seen which parts of the market—if any—will accept genetically modified rootstocks.
- 14.
Laws passed in 1919, 1927, and 1935 allowed the creation of the current system; the first French law on viticultural designations of origin dates to 1905 (Chevet et al. 2018, p. 69–73). Meloni and Swinnen (2013) discuss the political and policy context in which quality regulations were introduced, with their essential purpose at the time being to create a barrier to entry and restrict competition from surging imports, especially Algerian wine. This situation arose in the aftermath of the “Great French Wine Blight” from phylloxera, which led to the development of the Algerian wine industry to replace the great loss of production capacity in France during the period of the 1850s–1870s.
- 15.
In his provocatively titled book, Terroir and Other Myths of Winegrowing, Matthews (2015) challenges some of the conventional wisdom in this context. Hedonic studies by economists have produced a mixture of results on the value of terroir (see, e.g., the extensive listing of studies and discussion by Haeck et al. 2018). Nevertheless, there appears to be a clear general association of quality and price with the place of production for wine, and producers perceive returns to creating a collective reputation associated with a PDO. See Frick and Simmoins (2013) and studies they cite regarding the economics of collective reputation for wine.
- 16.
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Acknowledgements
The work for this project was partly supported by a Specialty Crop Research Initiative Competitive Grant, Award No. 2017-51181-26829 (the VitisGen 2 project) of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The authors are grateful for this support and for helpful comments and advice provided by Kym Anderson, Jim Lapsley, and Brad Rickard. Views expressed are the authors’ alone.
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Appendix 1: Data Resources
Appendix 1: Data Resources
Agricultural data are available from a variety of public sources for individual countries and for global aggregates. All these sources depend to some extent on national data agencies, which are not all equally reliable. Grape production is for the most part concentrated among higher-income countries that have comparatively reliable data resources, but even so, inconsistencies can arise (e.g., Alston et al. 2018a, b find substantial differences between alternative US sources of data on grape production in California).
It is not always possible to resolve such inconsistencies in terms of differences in definitions of variables, or assumptions, or to decide which source is more reliable. The fact that grapevines are long-lived perennials means issues arise about how to count non-bearing acreage and knowing if it is included in the data accurately. The fact that the product (e.g., wine) is often made within vertically integrated businesses, so the farm product is not traded on markets as such, adds to data gathering issues, including the challenge of determining whether grapes were used for fresh consumption, dried, or crushed, and if crushed whether destined for wine or other uses.
In this chapter, we make use of data from various sources, including (1) the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV) website: http://www.oiv.int/en/databases-and-statistics, (2) the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, FAO), FAOSTAT website: http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data, (3) the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service (USDA/FAS) website: https://www.fas.usda.gov/data, and (4) data on global wine markets compiled by Anderson and Pinilla (2018), available at the website: https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/titles/global-wine-markets/. We are conscious of discrepancies among these sources and do our best to make use of the best source for each purpose in ways that make for consistent comparisons within the chapter.
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Alston, J.M., Sambucci, O. (2019). Grapes in the World Economy. In: Cantu, D., Walker, M. (eds) The Grape Genome. Compendium of Plant Genomes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18601-2_1
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