Landed value grabbing in the terroir of post-socialist specialty wine

ABSTRACT

This article adds nuance to contested land ownership and ‘land grabs’ in postsocialist Europe in the context of protected sites of production: terroir. It calls attention to conceptions of land and value in these spaces, particularly in protected territories of specialty production. Considering the enclosed vineyard as an archetypical site of monopoly rent, I present a case study from a historic Hungarian wine region. Tracing the history of land tenure in the region, the privatization of terroir in the 1990s, and more recent state interventions, this study illustrates the need for contextualizing ‘land’ and ‘value’ in land grab analyses. Following recent land grab scholarship of this region, I argue that availability does not necessarily equal access, nor is ‘land’ limited to material resources. Rather, I turn to lived experiences of privatization to explore the dual nature of land as economic resource and collective heritage in a region of Euroscepticism and growing nationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Terroir
• post-socialism
• land grabbing
• landed value grabbing
• food systems

Acknowledgements

The author expresses gratitude to the dozens of winemakers, sellers, teachers, hospitality professionals, and patient locals who so graciously shared their time, passion, and wines during the course of this project, as well as the translation, research, and language assistance of Anna Veres and Claudia Móricz. Any remaining mistakes are the author’s. The author also wishes to thank the Hungarian-American Fulbright Commission for support during this fieldwork, and the Council for European Studies for writing support through the CES-Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship. This paper benefitted greatly from early-stage feedback provided by the editors of this special issue, three anonymous reviewers, and the advisement of Virginia Nazarea.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 EU citizens can purchase ‘residential’ lands or arable land less than one hectare. Some vineyards or fields contain outbuildings, but these do not qualify the land as residential. Holdings greater than one hectare are limited to ‘farmers’: those with degrees in forestry/agriculture or at least three years of justified and profitable agricultural activity in Hungary (sections 3 and 4 of the Hungarian law in question, 2013. évi CXXII. törvény a mező- és erdőgazdasági földek forgalmáról).

2 Arable land prices averaged 4368 EUR (HUF 1.535 mln)/hectare in 2017, or approximately 5069 USD. For comparison, the Netherlands (the highest reported EU average) averaged EUR 63 000, approximately 69,448 USD/hectare in 2018 – more than 13 times that of a Hungarian arable hectare (EuroStat, 2018).

3 See, for example, the Legend of the White Horse in Fidrich (2013).

4 Exact figures are unknown, as 1990–1997 land use statistics are unavailable or unreliable.

5 Generic, non-botrytized wines being far less labour- or capital-intensive.

6 These include aszú wines with concentration levels of five or more puttonyos.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hungarian-American Fulbright Commission for Educational Exchange (2016–2017) and a Mellon-CES Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2018–2019) from the Council for European Studies at Columbia University. No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct applications of this research.

Notes on contributors

A. June Brawner

June Brawner is a Senior Researcher at Justice Studio in London, UK. She received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Georgia in 2019. She completed this article during a Mellon-Council for European Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2018-2019). Prior to this, she completed an MS in Crop and Soil Sciences at the University of Georgia and conducted her doctoral fieldwork as a Fulbright Study Award grantee in Hungary (2016-2017). She earned an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary in 2011, where she first became academically interested in food production, agro-ecology, and rural development. She has worked and published on several interdisciplinary projects related to school lunch programmes, local foods, alternative agriculture, food policy, and musicology.