When Global Goes Sweet, Locals Turn Sour : Case Study of a Swiss Wine

The Swiss wine sector has been subject to profound transformations over the past thirty years, the most important of which being the introduction of the geographical indications (GI) policy at the beginning of the 1990’s, followed by the liberalization of the wine market in 2000, in the trend of economic globalization. By the same time, wine consumption dropped, putting national producers under increased pressure from abroad. These changes have generated new collective strategies at the local level, where wine producers have organized to resist and regain control over a product that does not only yield income, but also retains strong sensitive (taste related) and symbolic (identity) forms of values, which are being threatened by an increased mass retail of more standardized and sweeter wines. Developing a neo-institutional resource framework and applying it to a local Swiss wine, this paper documents dynamics of food sovereignty that bring actors to express unexpected forms of institutional creativity, around or beyond existing regulation, in the aim of excluding new threatening competitors and maintaining local producers’ revenue and identity