Aging community, changing crops: The faith of grapes in Turkey

Abstract

This article explains the social and economic changes that transpired in Turkey's rural areas by focusing on a vigneron village in the country's northwest. My goal is to show that the neo-liberalization of Turkey's economy in the 1980s and the privatization of state-owned production facilities in the 2000s exacerbated the devaluation of farmers' products and the depreciation of their labor. As a result of income unpredictability and an aging population, agrarian communities have either turned their vineyards into olive groves or uprooted them. Meanwhile, since the early 2000s, grape cultivation in Turkey has entered a wine-oriented phase primarily led by urbanites from non-agricultural sectors. Even though the percentage of wine grapes has increased in recent years, they mostly come from newly established vineyards of a new class of wine entrepreneurs. Based on 13 months of ethnographic research in vineyards and small-scale wineries in Turkey's Thrace, I argue that the peasantry in Turkey is in a transition that poses an indeterminate future for the country's grape cultivation and vineyard areas.

Keywords

• grape cultivation
• winemaking
• peasant class
• neo-liberalization
• Turkey
• viticulture