For millennia, humanity has viewed wine through a prism of poetry, ritual, and romance. To look back at the grand history of wine is to map the foundational footprints of human civilization itself. From Neolithic communities burying clay qvevri in the fertile soils of the South Caucasus, to Roman legions clear-cutting European forests to plant the ancestors of today’s iconic vineyards, wine has long been a liquid archive of our species’ cultural evolution. It was an agricultural product touched by the divine, surviving empires, revolutions, and deep structural crises.
Yet, if you look closely past the romanticized sheen of modern tasting notes and sun-drenched vineyard aesthetics, the modern wine bottle reveals a vastly different story. Today, wine is no longer just a companion to philosophy and art; it is a global commodity caught in a high-stakes tug-of-war between corporate financialization, environmental degradation, and fierce cultural resistance.
In his open-access monograph, Value Struggles: Looking at Capitalism through the Wine Glass (Bloomsbury Academic), Stefano Ponte, Professor of International Political Economy at the Copenhagen Business School, uses our favorite vintage to dismantle the neat myths of modern global commerce. His findings offer a sobering, deeply analytical look at what we are actually tasting when we raise a glass: is it truly the terroir, or is it the quiet, continuous friction of contemporary capitalism?
The Fragmented Battlefield of the Vine
What makes wine the ultimate lens for understanding modern capitalism is its unique economic friction. Unlike heavily consolidated agricultural industries—such as coffee, grain, or soy—the global wine market remains surprisingly fragmented. It hasn’t been entirely swallowed by a handful of corporate giants.
Instead, wine operates on a spectrum. On one end sit massive, uniform, corporate-branded labels built on predictability, industrial efficiency, and financial speculation. On the other end thrives a fiercely defensive counter-movement championing craft, heritage, organic biodynamics, and ancestral techniques. Because these two forces must coexist within the same global value chains, the wine world has become a primary stage for what Ponte calls “value struggles.”
These struggles aren’t just about price points or profit margins; they are battles over how we define “value” itself. Is wine’s value derived from a corporate marketing team and a standardized flavor profile engineered to score high on a critic’s 100-point scale? Or does its value belong to the land, the unpredictable weather, and the human hands that harvested the grapes?
Extracting the Intangible: “Predatory Accumulation”
To trace the friction of modern viticulture, Value Struggles conducts a fine-grained comparative analysis across two starkly different winemaking powerhouses: Italy and South Africa. Through these case studies, Ponte introduces a compelling concept: contemporary capitalism no longer just extracts value from raw labor time. It engages in “predatory accumulation”, a process that actively mines value from place, nature, and identity.
In the historic terroirs of Italy, artisanal pride and centuries-old local traditions increasingly collide with the cold calculus of branding and financial investment. Corporate actors leverage the regional prestige built over generations by small-scale farmers, using the legal frameworks of geographical indications (like DOCG) to commercialize and monetize “authenticity” for global markets.
In South Africa, the value struggles run even deeper, tangled in the painful, enduring legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Here, the book unmasks a unsettling paradox: while high-end estates sell narratives of biodiversity, ethical tourism, and fair-trade sustainability to consumers in the Global North, these progressive labels frequently obscure a harsh reality on the ground. Behind the pristine Cape Dutch architecture, systemic inequalities persist, where gendered and racialized labor continues to experience precarious wages and deep economic imbalances.
Tasting the Friction
By contextualizing these dynamics, Ponte forces us to rethink the concept of terroir. In traditional winemaking, terroir is the magical combination of soil, topography, and climate that gives a wine its specific sense of place. But in the modern global economy, terroir has been politicized. It is an asset to be protected, a brand to be aggressively marketed, and a site of resistance where local producers attempt to shield their heritage from corporate homogenization.
When we sip a glass of wine today, we are tasting the outcome of these ongoing negotiations. Every bottle reflects a compromise between ecological boundaries (increasingly strained by climate change), corporate pressures to standardize, and human movements fighting for fair labor practices and regional survival.
Why the Story of Wine Still Matters
The long historical trajectory of viticulture reminds us that wine has always been resilient. It survived the fall of Rome, medieval upheavals, and the devastating nineteenth-century phylloxera plague that nearly wiped out Europe’s vineyards entirely.
But as Value Struggles masterfully demonstrates, the modern challenges facing wine cannot be solved purely by technical innovation or clever marketing. The future of wine hinges on how we resolve the inequalities baked into its production. Ponte’s critique is essential reading because it is critical without being cynical; even as he maps the extractive nature of modern capitalism, he highlights the vibrant alternative circuits—from natural wine movements to local worker cooperatives—that are actively rewriting the rules of the trade.
Ultimately, looking at capitalism through the wine glass doesn’t ruin the pleasure of the pour. Instead, it invites us to become more conscious participants in its evolution. The next time you open a bottle, take a moment to look past the label. Appreciate the deep civilizational history that brought the vine to our modern world, but recognize the quiet, human labor and the ongoing economic struggles that allowed it to reach your glass.
