An ephemeral project on private regulation of viticulture in Mendoza (Argentina) in a crisis context: Mendoza’s Viticulture Society, 1916-1919

Abstract

In early 1917, a company that gathered all of Mendoza’s wine producers was founded. This was the last anti-cyclical strategy promoted by the State with the goal of dealing with a long lasting economical crisis. It aimed to set wine and grape prices in a monopolistic fashion, and to establish wine marketing quotas. The limited amount of bibliography on this topic is what motivated this study, based on 3 aspects: how it was created, who it benefitted and how it was dissolved. Lack of official documentation forced its story to be rebuilt with information gathered from newspapers and public and private memoirs. It was concluded that the ideas this experiment was based on were misguided, since wine is a dispensable and replaceable asset. It was also concluded that it benefitted wine growers and that its dissolution process was longer and more complex than it foreseen.

Keywords

• Mendoza
• viticulture
• economical crisis
• monopoly