ABSTRACT
Concentration in wineries is highly unequal, varying from the thousands of production units in France and Italy to South Africa’s quasi-monopolistic structure. Several major disparities in corporate market structures exist between the wine and the much more highly concentrated beer and spirits sectors. Wine wars for larger slices of the world export market between Italy, France and the USA are waging. While the Iberian peninsula’s wine sectors remain more or less fragmented like those of their competitors in France and Italy, the beginnings of a foreign capital intrusion are far more blatant, seen in the transition of their four major wine-producing areas. Group A has become the centre of wine output and consumption, with the beverage playing an important cultural role in moulding life styles. Group B consists of four rapidly growing wine-consuming countries where more advanced concentration levels, far higher than those in Group A, are evidenced at the winery stage: the USA, South Africa, the UK and Japan.
