Doing good by drinking wine? Ethical value networks and upscaling of wine production in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa

ABSTRACT

There has been a rise in recent decades of consumer campaigns to promote more ethically responsible food and consumer goods production. These campaigns have spanned movements such as fair trade, food miles and organics. They have evoked significant if uneven response from producers and some government agencies. These responses, seen in changes to production methods, ownership structures, distribution systems and marketing have involved new ways of thinking and operating and can be regarded as interesting forms of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). Adopting combined sectoral and locality case study perspectives, this paper examines the example of the wine industry in a number of production locations (South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) and analyses how ethically responsible values of justice (fair trade), sustainability (organic production) and provenance (Geographical Indications) have been translated into forms of industrial innovation embodied and perpetuated through and in ‘ethical value networks’.

KEYWORDS:

• Wine
• ethical value networks
• fair trade
• organic agriculture
• geographical indications

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

John Overton http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9080-9510

Warwick E. Murray http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2597-3779

Notes

1 This ‘rule’ allows for the use of a name (varietal, year or place of origin) on a label, as long as at least 85 per cent of the product conforms to that description.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Marsden Fund [grant number 14-VUW-082].