Mapping of wine industry

Abstract

Having reviewed a variety of approaches to understanding the essence of wine industry, having studied the modern ideas about the future of wine industry, having analyzed more than 50 maps from the Internet we have set the trends and special features of wine industry mapping in the world, such as: - the vast majority of maps displays the development of the industry at regional or national level, whereas there are practically no world maps; - wine-growing regions are represented on maps very unevenly; - all existing maps of the industry could be classified as analytical ascertaining inventory type; - the dominant ways of cartographic representation are area method and qualitative background method, sign method and collation maps are rarely used; - basically all the Internet maps have low quality as they are scanned images with poor resolution; - the special feature of maps published lately is lack of geographical basis (except for state borders and coastline). We created wine production and consumption world map «Wine Industry» in the scale of 1:60 000 000 with simple geographical basis (state names, state borders, major rivers, coastline). It was concluded that from the methodological point of view it is incorrect not to show geographical basis on maps of wine industry. Analysis of this map allowed us to identify areas of traditional wine-making, potential wine-making areas and countries which claim to be the world leaders in the field of wine production. We found disbalans between wine production and wine consumption - increasing wine production in South America, China and the United States and increasing wine consumption (mainly due to the import products) in countries where the grape is not the primary agricultural product.