Wine GB: Sparkling opportunism in the “New/Old World”?

Since the global financial crisis, wine production has become an increasingly visible feature of the British rural economy, responding to the market opportunities posed by the rise of an affluent and status-attentive middle class attuned to the equally globalizing, cosmopolitan, and hedonistic cultures of sparkling wines. These new wine producers have taken advantage of a shifting imbrication of climatic, political, socio-geographic, and production modalities to promote their positionality as new “quality” sparkling wine producers. Based upon collaborative anthropological research, this article examines their diverse strategies to enter the global wine market in the context of the recent granting of the PDO global marker of quality and Brexit.