ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of how the wine industry has been governed at the European scale, why this has recently changed and what this contributes to knowledge about the political economy of the European Union (EU) as a whole. In order to fully grasp the extent of political change wrought recently within the wine industry via its European scale of government, as well as its initial promoters, one must of course first grasp what and who ordered it virtually unchallenged until the mid-1990s. The scope of EU-scale government has become wider, notably through a recategorization of wines and a recalibration of micro-economic grants which reach beyond national and regional boundaries in order to directly affect grower and merchant behaviour. The establishment of the European Community (EC) each of its wine producing states had already developed a number of converging norms and institutions based essentially upon the French governmental model.
