This article documents the sudden creation of a significant entrepôt for French wine, particularly Bordeaux claret, in Boulogne-Sur-Mer starting in 1720. Scottish Jacobites who practiced a rebellious version of “fair trade” dominated this commerce, and their network had direct links to 18th-century economic thinkers such as Richard Cantillon, Charles de Montesquieu, and David Hume. The research uses social network analysis to analyze and visualize the concurrent networks, which by the 1750s included the French physiocrats. The research shows how politically inspired actions and strategies affected not only the wine entrepôt’s formation but also the circulation of ideas regarding “fair,” “free,” and balanced trade among Franco-British economic theorists. It also documents the formation of a dedicated claret commodity chain as well as the advent of wine product, packaging, and marketing specialization in the 18th century. These Jacobites formed wine trading firms that lasted long after the relevance of their political objectives had waned.

This study uses gravity models to explain bilateral patterns of global wine trade since 1962. This is, to our knowledge, the first study on global wine trade covering the second wave of globalization as a whole. The results suggest that the impact of distance, common language, and common colonizer post-1945 on wine trade was lower in the 1991–2019 period than in the 1962–1990 period. We also use gravity models to explain the impact on bilateral wine trade patterns of similarities across countries in the mix of winegrape varieties in their vineyards. Although our models do not allow us to identify causality, the results suggest that countries trade more wine with each other the closer their mix of winegrape varieties.

The objective of this article is to analyze the determinants of world wine exports in the first globalization, taking into account the principal exporting countries and using an extended version of the gravity model. The article distinguishes between ordinary- and high-quality wines. Our econometric results show that wine exports were not affected by the increase in the size of the markets of consuming countries, since in most of them wine was an alcoholic beverage consumed by a very small minority of the population. The harvests of the producing countries, particularly in preceding years, significantly and positively affected their exports. Conversely, the harvests of importers hurt exports as there was a home bias in consumption due to cultural, price, or tariff protection reasons. In the interwar period, the wine trade was severely affected by a series of shocks such as WWI, the Soviet revolution, the Prohibition, and the 1930s depression. As was the case with trade as a whole, the fall in transaction costs, favored exports, at least those of lower-priced and lower-quality wine. However, the liberalization of trade had a lesser impact on wine than on other products. (JEL Classifications: F14, N50, Q13, Q17)