Creating Wine: The Emergence of a World Industry, 1840-1914 Hardback - 2011

"Creating Wine draws on richly diverse primary sources from the New and Old World to explain how modern wine came into being during the first period of globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Deftly written and immensely entertaining, it is hard to put down and is a must-read for anyone interested in the history or economics of wine and food. Bravo!"--James T. Lapsley, author of Bottled Poetry: Napa Winemaking from Prohibition to the Modern Era

"Conventional wine histories typically give us the chteau, the region, or the country. Simpson's ambitious work instead puts at the center and in global perspective the wine sector as a whole. This viewpoint provides valuable insight into struggles over the commoditization of wine, tensions within commodity chains, the challenge to the Old World of the New, and battles between brand, terroir, and varietal. The result is a refreshingly new and engrossing modern history of a global trade."--Paul Duguid, University of California, Berkeley

"Simpson fills a void in wine economics. We learn about environmental issues, overproduction, export crises, institutional responses, the eternal competition with beer, and the rise of wine production in the New World. All of this happened two hundred years ago, but the issues have not changed. This book has a lot to say and one learns a lot. A must-read for economists, historians, politicians, and wine lovers alike."--Karl Storchmann, New York University and Journal of Wine Economics

"This book tells the fascinating story of the transformation of wine from a cheap table drink for Europeans into a highly diversified, quasi-luxury good for consumers all over the world. Simpson maps the worldwide expansion of wine production and describes in lively but rigorous style the challenges that producers and merchants faced and the different solutions they adopted in Europe and the New World."--Giovanni Federico, author of Feeding the World

"Why is it that the wine industry in the New World is dominated by a small number of wineries whereas in Europe there is no such concentration? This fascinating book not only reveals that this difference was evident more than a century ago, it also explains why, and the reasons are just as relevant today as they were then."--Kym Anderson, Wine Economics Research Centre and University of Adelaide

"This is an impressive work of scholarship that brings together a wide range of material about the transformation and globalization of the wine industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wine historians, economic historians, and significant segments of the general public will find much of interest."--John V. C. Nye, author of War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689-1900

"Creating Wine is a boldly pioneering analysis of the complex process by which such forces as increased trade, rising consumer demand, and frequent economic crisis and disease ruptured the older wine economy and opened the way to a global wine industry in the twentieth century. However excellent, earlier studies in this area do not approach the level of concrete synthesis or analytic coherence this book provides. An impressive achievement."--J. Harvey Smith, Northern Illinois University