Winemaking cooperative

A wine cooperative is an association of winemakers of a place or area in the legal form of a cooperative, press the grapes of its own vineyards and produce centrally under a common name from wine and market it. In various wine regions synonyms are used, in Württemberg wine cooperative and cooperative winery in South Tyrol.

The winemakers cooperation offers several advantages. So the larger common vineyard allows better selection of special grape qualities. For the important areas such as aging the wines in the cellar for the wine sales relevantly trained professionals as winemaker and marketing professionals can be engaged. The sharing of staff, equipment, machinery and buildings for winemaking and distribution optimizes the production and distribution costs. Strict common quality and production rules provide a high quality grape production safely. Members must be targeted not only by the general wine statutory minimum requirements, but also regulate the cooperative wine production additionally usually far beyond their own, more stringent quality rules. Internal competition between individual growers can lead to a steady increase in the quality.

A disadvantage is that wine lovers often the direct reference to the winemaker miss, as the wines produced in this way are marketed through a cooperative. Another that because of structural reasons, lack of internal competition ( commons - terminal) may decrease the quality of the wine produced continuously.

Thus, the association result in a wine cooperative to improve as the deterioration of the quality of wine. What direction a wine cooperative, is dependent on the skill of its professional staff to a high degree.

In 2012 there were in the 13 German wine regions 202 winegrowers. Its members manage approximately 32,181 acres (about 30 % of the total vineyard area in Germany ) and about 3 million hectoliters of wine.

History

The oldest wine cooperative is the Mayschosser Winzerverein of 1868. You persists to this day in 1982 merged Winegrowers Mayschoß / Altenahr.

Theodor Heuss ' promotion from 1905 on viticulture and wine farmers stand in Heilbronn am Neckar gave rise to an intense scientific study of the winegrowers and other start-ups.

In South Tyrol, the co-operative idea in 1893 resulted in Andrian establishing the first cooperative winery.