Abstract
In many regions of Spain and Portugal, wine is still not very profitable for winegrowers who barely recover the economic and human capital inputs dedicated throughout the year to each harvest. The economic logic of the market is rapidly transforming this landscape and heritage in more and more regions, promoting the mechanization of viticulture for the sake of productivity, giving priority above all to the volume of grapes obtained and the reduction of production costs. In this sense, goblet vines and low vines are giving way to trellising, and the latter to harvesting machinery. However, the value of vine cultivation and winemaking goes far beyond economic profitability as an inseparable part of the cultural landscape and Mediterranean cultures. This chapter delves into cases of good practices for wine tourism and the enormous wealth of the musical heritage and, in general, the intangible cultural heritage (sayings, customs, traditions, agrarian and culinary traditions) surrounding wine.
TopMoral Economy
Following the Spanish anthropologist, González Alcantud, moral economy is a concept forged by J. Scott and P. Thompson, to refer to economic dynamics characterised (whether among the farmers of Southeast Asia or among the English peasants of the 14th century) by a negative entropic regulation, i.e. tending to establish the limits of self-subsistence or the “fair price” of agricultural products on the market. “Morality”, in this sense, would be a regulating principle that prevents the emergence of positive entropy generating chaos (Scott, 1976: 157 ff. cited in González Alcantud, 1998).
Taking the example of economies of traditional agriculture as wine economy or pastoral economy, we would use the significant “moral economy” to to build on it, giving it a series of characteristics that would give it a new framework of meaning.
So we can talk of moral economy when an economic activity continues when the economic racionalism of profitability does not occur, nor are the risks of the activity fully covered by internal or external mechanisms. But we would add a new condition, when the activity is in itself a fundamental element of and for the cultural landscape or generates services that are not remunerated by the market or the administration, as is the case of the impact of grazing in the prevention and mitigation of losses caused by fires or of viticulture in providing essential elements to landscapes such as the Alto Douro Wine Region that has been declared a world heritage site by UNESCO in 2001.
In these cases, it is important for the administrations to support these economic environments when they fail to find the means in market logics to subsist, but not as a non-repayable subsidy, but as a remuneration for services and impacts on tourism or the environment that can nowadays be fairly accurately calculated.
Technology is raising productivity in agricultural and livestock activities. This naturally lower the prices of the products in origin and making unprofitable smallholder activities that have not transferred productivity gains via technology. At present days, while we write these lines, the tractors of many vine growers are blocking roads in many regions of Spain, in demonstrations because they are being paid 15 cents of an Euro per kilogram of grapes.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Wine Heritage: Tangible and intangible cultural heritage arising from the production, consumption and ideation of wine.
Baptised Wine: Wine that has been diluted with water to lower its alcoholic strength or increase its profitability.
Zejel: A strophic composition of Spanish metric, of Arabic origin, commonly used by popular poets in Al Andalus.
Moral Economy: An economic activity that is still carried out when it is no longer profitable, and which the public administration has a duty to safeguard because of its important contribution to heritage and the cultural landscape.
Porrón: (In Spanish) Wine drinking vessel, usually made of glass or ceramic, with two holes, the one that is directed to the drinker's mouth of small diameter to allow the wine to fall in a fine stream.
Merluza: (In Spanish) Hake. Figuratively drunkenness.
Cultural Heritage: Set of tangible and intangible cultural elements that are transmitted from generation to generation and recognised by the members of a culture as well as by outsiders as fundamental to its expression of identity.