Article

a Network perspective of the port wine sector

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Port is a fortified wine named after Porto, the second largest Portuguese city, where it has traditionally been shipped from. However, port begins its life in the Douro valley, which starts some 100 km east of Porto (or Oporto in its anglicised form) and extends as far as the Spanish border. The valley is a demarcated region where an estimated 30,000 farmers grow what is considered to be one of the great wines of the world.
Despite the intervention of tens of thousands of actors in the port value chain, they can be grouped into four main categories: farmers, wine cooperatives, shipping houses and distributors. Traditionally, grape growing and wine making were undertaken by independent farmers who sold their production to the shipping houses. These, in turn, organised the transport of the wine from the valley down the river Douro, and stored and aged it in their lodges located in the Porto suburb of Vila Nova de Gaia. Furthermore, the shippers promoted and sold the wine all over the world to hundreds of distributors.
Over the past decades some meaningful changes have occurred in this process, most of them related to the emergence of new actors. Firstly, a number of wine cooperatives have been created in the Douro region since the early 1950s. Originally, these cooperatives received the grapes from the farmers, produced the wine and then sold it to the shippers. Today, some cooperatives are also selling part of their production directly to the distributors. Secondly, most farmers, who continued to sell their production to the shippers, have closed their wineries. This means that they are exclusively producing grapes while a major part of the wine is made by the shippers.
This shift was reinforced because most shippers have also acquired large estates (called quintas) in the Douro valley where they grow some of the grapes they need. Finally, since the mid-1980s farmers have begun to age and bottle their wine and ship it directly from the Douro valley.
However, attempting to understand such an economic system on the basis of its value chain does not capture the major driving forces of this industry since some of the most important players are not directly involved in the production and trade processes. The objective of this paper is to develop an analysis of the port wine sector from a relational, holistic and dynamic perspective. It is divided into three sections. The first elaborates on the model developed by the IMP (Industrial/international marketing and purchasing) Group, which offers a network approach of economic systems. The second section develops a network view of the port wine sector on the basis of the conceptual framework developed by the IMP Group. The article ends with a number of conclusions and managerial implications that are likely to be extend to other wine regions.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

ATC PO BRI n

Penerbit

United Kingdom : Emerald Insight., 2016

Deskripsi Fisik

17 pages

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

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Klasifikasi

PO

Tipe Isi

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Tipe Media

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Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

Vol. 18 Iss 2 pp. 124 - 138

Subjek

Wines
Marketing mix
Economic sectors
Portugal

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

Carlos Brito

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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